After reading and enjoying The Python God, the first Thomas Adam Grey thriller by Duane Laflin, I picked up the second one when it came out: The Fortune Cave.
Laflin is a professional magician who has retired and now writes novels. Wayne Reinagel has done the covers for both books so far.
Thomas Adam Grey is a Secret Service agent tired of protecting corrupt politicians. He has decided to quit and start his own personal protection business, based in Kansas City. Thomas is over 6-feet tall, with hair halfway between brown and blonde, and grey eyes. He is often compared to a lion in human form.
Assisting him is his secretary, and possible future love interest, Tiffany Swensen, who will run his office. But unlike other thriller heroes, Thomas doesn’t have others he can call on. Unlike in the first book, his former boss at the Secret Service does not appear.
This time, the novel starts off with a flashback to the Arkansas River some time after the War of 1812. We met Bully Black, a river pirate, who leads a group that robs keelboats. But Bully doesn’t drink away his earnings, but squirrels away a treasure of gold coins. But things don’t go quite as he expects, especially after he is captured, and his treasure instead becomes the stuff of legend.
A new landowner of the area that includes Bully’s hideout makes an incredible discovery. Newly divorced Gabrielle Jones finds some of the coins and makes the mistake of revealing it to a friend, who blabs. Word of it gets to a man with criminal tendencies who has a big interest in Bully: Jamison Root. He has several businesses, mainly in storage, including some former salt mines, but isn’t above taking advantage of this for his benefit.
Gabrielle decides she needs protection and hires Gray. But now things get trickier. We get exploding grain elevators, high-speed car chases, kidnapping off a Mississippi river boat, and an explosive (in more ways than one) conclusion.
Not helping things is that Root has gotten the attention of the FBI. And this brings in a couple of agents, one being Agent Chatley. He butts head with Gray. Will he be a help or a hindrance in what happens?
Yes, the bad guys lose, and lose big, and the good guys win. But the thrill is how this happens. At the end, I wonder how some changes will affect the next story? Will we see an increase in secondary characters going forward?
As before, my only complaint about the work is formatting. I felt that the author should have used a smaller font and less spacing, which would have produced a physically smaller book, and probably a little less expensive one as well. I would recommend that the author think about teaming up with established New Pulp publishers like Airship 27 or Bold Venture Press. And when there are several paragraphs of dialogue by the same character, you drop the ending parenthesis from all but the final paragraph.
The next work, The Treasure Whale came out in early June. I hope we will see more. If you liked this one, check out some of the author’s other works. The Carson Gold series seems similar, and is even recommended at the end of this volume, as are the Eli Brown ones, though I haven’t read them myself.
