Sunday, February 7, 2010

By Reviewed by David and Nancy Beckwith

"The Wrecker"

by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott

G.P. Putnam's Sons, $27

Clive Cussler, best-selling adventure novelist, has succeeded again as the master of adventure in "The Wrecker," his latest historical thriller.

Cussler is best known for his 20 Dirk Pitt novels. Now he has an electrifying new hero, Isaac Bell. "The Wrecker" is the second book in this latest series; the first book, "The Chase," introduced Bell as the brilliant investigator for the Van Dorn Detective agency.

These two books stand alone from the other Cussler novels because they are set in the early part of the 20th century. "The Chase" revolves around the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire (and was Cussler's first book in four years not co-written with another author). "The Wrecker" takes place in 1907, a year of financial panic and labor unrest.

Both books involve the railroads. In "The Chase," Bell is hired to find a ruthless bank robber and ends up in a locomotives chase. In "The Wrecker," he pursues justice as a result of train wrecks, fires and explosions that sabotage the Southern Pacific Railroad's expansion in the Cascades.

The wrecker is a mysterious saboteur, a killer who recruits accomplices to carry out his sinister plan to attack the railroad, its employees and passengers. When his recruits have completed their tasks, he kills them to mask his identity.

Who is the wrecker? What is his motive? Is he an anarchist determined to displace the privileged? Is he a striker? Could he be a criminal mastermind deploying an unexplained scheme?

Whoever he is he's traversing the country, attacking all facets of the Southern Pacific Railroad, creating havoc and causing untold damage and loss of life.

As the lead investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency with its nationwide staff , Bell is hired to stop him before the saboteur puts the entire nation at risk.

A page-turner of intricate plots, descriptive scenes and a deductive protagonist, "The Wrecker" has to be one of the most entertaining thrillers we have read.

Recently we met up with Cussler at the Vero Beach Book Center. An interesting comment he made was that his new character, Isaac Bell, is not only tall and handsome but also blond, something that Cussler has always wanted in a hero. "When I started writing the Pitt books, all the characters of the time, such as James Bond, were dark-haired," he told us. "But I wanted to make Dirk blond. So I did a survey among women -- really just talking to women friends and associates -- about what they thought was handsome. They all seemed to prefer a tall, dark, mysterious man. So that's what Dirk became."

Now Cussler finally has his blond leading character and "everyone seems to like him."

Many well-known authors have utilized co-authors; besides Cussler, others include James Patterson, W.E.B. Griffin and Robert Ludlum. "The Wrecker" co-author is Justin Scott, a mystery writer who created the Ben Abbott series and who has written thrillers and sea stories under the pen name of Paul Garrison. Born in New York into a family of professional writers, Scott has written 23 novels and was twice nominated for the Poe Award. Cussler and Scott have written a third Isaac Bell Novel, "The Spy," that is scheduled for release in June.

Cussler was born in Aurora, Ill., but grew up in Alhambra, Calif. He has authored or co-authored 40 fiction and nonfiction books, of which 17 have reached the New York Times fiction best-seller list. As an underwater explorer, he has discovered more than 60 shipwrecks and written several nonfiction books about it. As the founder of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), a nonprofit organization that conducts his underwater discoveries, he uses NUMA as the fictional government agency that employs Pitt in the novels.

His books are published in more than 40 languages in 100 countries with an estimated 125 million fans -- including us.