Min­ing engi­neer Philip Mer­cer attends a Paris rare book auc­tion, charged by a friend with buy­ing a nineteenth-century jour­nal writ­ten by Godin de Lep­inay. Lep­inay explored Panama dur­ing the plan­ning stages of the Panama Canal, and Mercer’s friend Gary Bar­ber thinks that the jour­nal might offer some clues to find­ing a fabled Incan trea­sure. At the auc­tion, a mys­te­ri­ous Chi­nese bid­der buys every­thing asso­ci­ated with the Panama Canal. Luck­ily the auc­tion­eer is an old friend of Mercer’s, and sets aside the jour­nal for him. But, Mer­cer doesn’t make it very far from the auc­tion house before he finds him­self being pur­sued by three Chi­nese assas­sins. He leads them on a chase through the cat­a­combs and sew­ers of Paris, even­tu­ally man­ag­ing to escape with the jour­nal intact.

Mer­cer then trav­els to Panama as quickly as he can, intend­ing to meet up with his friend. He arrives at Berber’s base camp deep in the jun­gle only to find the whole team dead. Mer­cer and Cap­tain Lau­ren Vanik, a U.S. Army offi­cer sta­tioned nearby, scope out the area, and are nearly killed by another team of Chi­nese mer­ce­nar­ies. Real­iz­ing that they have stum­bled into the mid­dle of some sin­is­ter plot, they set out to inves­ti­gate fur­ther. Along the way, they are joined by a team of French For­eign Legion­naires, a for­mer canal pilot, and a retired sea cap­tain, and reveal an impend­ing Chi­nese power-grab on the world stage.

I picked this book up because I was curi­ous what one of Clive Cussler’s “co-writers” writes under his own name. Unsur­pris­ingly, Cus­sler and DuBrul seem to be cut from the same cloth. River of Ruin con­tains many of the ele­ments that make up the stan­dard Cus­sler for­mula: a rugged scientist/adventurer, a gor­geous and very capa­ble love inter­est, an archae­o­log­i­cal puz­zle, water-based action sequences, and a nefar­i­ous plot to take over the world. DuBrul’s tale comes across as a bit more grounded in real­ity than do many of Cussler’s, how­ever; River of Ruin is still a thrill-a-minute adven­ture novel, but it is lergely free of the “oh, come on!” moments that abound in Cussler.