QUEST
By: David Wood
Gryphonwood Press: Grayson, GA
2011 (pb), eKindle (2011)
Young Professor Thomas Thornton has led an “ecology
fieldtrip” into the deep recesses of the Amazon rainforest, but when he, his
grad assistant and two undergraduates fail to return as scheduled, his best
friend and university colleague back in Charleston, South Carolina, follows
instructions should this happen, and delivers an envelope to his fiancée,
Kaylin Maxwell. Immediately after the exchange is made, the friend is
snatched off the street and Kaylin is pursued by thugs who are obviously
intent upon seeing the contents of the envelope.
Given the disappearance of her fiancée and the attack
by persons unknown and the apparent inability of the local police to help
her, Kaylin turns to the one man she believes can help her find Thomas
Thornton: adventurer and underwater archaeologist Dane Maddock and his
sidekick, Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake. The situation is complicated a bit by
the fact that Kaylin, first introduced in the first Dane Maddock novel,
Dourado, was once his lover. Somewhat reluctantly Dane takes on the
search for her new love and thus begins another harum-scarum Dane Maddock
adventure.
The contents of the mystery envelope contained the
likeness of a portrait traced to the Royal Geographical Society—a portrait
of famed early 20th Century explorer and adventurer, Percy
Fawcett, who, like Professor Thornton, was never to return from the Amazon
while searching for a lost city he called “Z.”* Thomas Thornton had long
been obsessed by the lore and legend of Percy Fawcett, and it is obvious to
Dane and Bones that there is some connection between the two
disappearances. The intrepid adventurers follow clues found in the Fawcett
portrait, including secrets left in Fawcett’s annotated copy of Conan
Doyle’s best-selling The Lost World** and the good ship Quest,
made famous by polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.
With bad guys constantly at their heels, Dane, Bones,
Kaylin, and Dane’s crew of adventurers embark on a scavenger hunt, seeking
answers to riddles left by Thornton in the present and Fawcett in the past
that inevitably lead them to the Brazilian jungles that seemed to swallow up
the two men separated in time by some 85 years.
While the dialogue can be painfully wooden at times,
and the characters are rather one-dimensional, the plot and the action do
gallop along at a blistering pace. The adventure does feature a rogue
bioengineering company; the return of the sinister “Dominion” conspiracy
from the earlier novel Cibola; zombie-like warriors; a lost city
inhabited by the descendants of Carthaginian refugees fleeing the Third
Punic War, who have guarded a monstrous secret for more than 2,000 years;
and even a final showdown with the Mapinguari, legendary (and reported
deadly) giant sloth-like creatures said to inhabit the Amazon! What’s not
to like about a book like this!
Two trowels for this unabashedly delightful guilty
pleasure.
* For a thoroughly enjoyable historical recounting of
the life and times of Col. Percy Fawcett and his passionate quest, see David
Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
(Doubleday Publishers, 2009)
** Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World
(1912) is arguably still the best of its genre.
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