After reading the first Brock Stone, Arena of Souls (2014) by David Wood, I got and read the next two. These are Track of the Beast (2021) and Curse of the Pharaoh (2023). This ongoing series is set in the early 1930s.
David Wood is a fairly prolific author with several other series, including a long one with Dane Maddock, a former Navy SEAL turned treasure hunter, that has several tie-in works. All of these works appear to be set in the same “universe,” including the Brock Stone novels. The events of this series impact the others, as well as a couple of the characters in other series who are descendants of the main characters here, and we meet the ancestor of one of the main characters in the third book.
Brock Stone is an adventurer who has been in the military and has been traveling the world for several years prior to the first book. His parents passed away recently, thus he is well off financially. The first book starts after his grandfather leaves him a challenge and he becomes the target of a mysterious businessman, John Kane.
Brock is joined by a trio of childhood friends: Trinity Page, his sometimes girlfriend who is an investigative reporter; Alex English, a mechanical genius with a hook instead of his left hand after what happened in the first book; and Moses Gibbs, the son of his grandfather’s groundskeeper.
Track of the Beast starts off with weird things going on in the Pacific Northwest. People are going missing. Is it bigfoot? Trinity is there looking into things. Meanwhile Alex and Brock are investigating a pyramid built in Virginia following the Civil War, which leads them to finding a memorial built by the Illuminati. This leads to some information tied to what Brock found in the previous book.
After meeting a Constance Cray, who claims to be a librarian with a message from Trinity that points to a connection to Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the group heads out there in a new plane they built. There seems to be a connection to John Kane as well, though he doesn’t appear in this one. But it appears they have a new foe: the Illuminati.
Getting to the area, they start their search for Trinity, which is difficult. It all comes to a head when they uncover what is going on with Bigfoot, the Illuminati, and more. And what the connection to Lewis and Clark is. This hints at events in future novels as well.
We also get a flashback storyline set five years previous, telling of Brock in Tibet and what he found and experienced there.
Curse of the Pharaoh is set in 1932. This time the team notices that an exhibit of a recently deceased Egyptologist at the Smithsonian will have a special pre-showing attended by John Kane, along with an up-and-coming German actress, Magda Fisher. Clearly, something is up, and so they work out how to get into the exhibit before Kane and his friends can. It’s clear that Kane has ties to the Illuminati and the Germans.
Brock’s team does so, but not without incident. Strangely, Constance Cray also shows up, so will she become a part of the group? They get part of a map, along with discovering that Kane is after the resting place of the Night Queen. This leads them to another source of information in D.C., where they again run into Kane. From that, they know to head to Egypt. And another confrontation with Kane and maybe Magda before it’s all done. The aftermath will set things up for further adventures.
We again get a flashback storyline set six years prior. This tells of Brock’s last mission as a soldier, which would lead him to the events we say in the last volume’s flashback storyline. Will we continue to get these in upcoming books?
I have no idea when we’ll get the next novel. While things are set up at the end of the third novel, nothing is announced. As it came out about a couple of years, I hope we get the next one. Readers might want to check out his other books, which are set in modern times.
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