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.

Sock is, at its heart, a mys­tery novel; a woman is mur­dered and the pro­tag­o­nist, a police­man, sets out to find her killer. But, as one might expect from the self-described “larger, louder half” of Penn & Teller, this is far from your stan­dard detec­tive novel. The story is nar­rated by Dickie, the main character’s sock mon­key. Dickie’s owner, who we only know as ‘the Lit­tle Fool’ for most of the book, is a cop, but he’s not a detec­tive. He’s a police diver who spends most of his time pulling bod­ies out of New York’s East River; he doesn’t nor­mally solve cases. But, when one of the bod­ies he retrieves turns out to be that of Nell, one of his ex-girlfriends, the Lit­tle Fool decides to try his hand at detec­tive work.

He has to do so in a com­pletely unof­fi­cial capac­ity, of course, and he enlists the help of Tommy, Nell’s best friend and pedi­curist. The unlikely part­ners spend all their free time try­ing to recon­struct Nell’s last days and fig­ure out who might have mur­dered her. They get a break in the form of a note from the killer. But, as the Lit­tle Fool finds the note pinned to another body he pulls out of the river, it also means that they’re deal­ing with a dan­ger­ous psy­chopath who will almost cer­tainly kill again.

Penn’s sock mon­key nar­ra­tor cer­tainly pro­vides an inter­est­ing twist, but I found Dickie’s stream-of-consciousness nar­ra­tive style to be some­what dis­tract­ing. I could get used to it after awhile, but it made for a slow start every time I picked up the book. Also, although Penn has a fairly inter­est­ing story to tell, he does it in a very vul­gar man­ner. I’m not eas­ily offended, but I found the sheer quan­tity of curs­ing and descrip­tions of sex acts to be a bit much. I read some of this book while trav­el­ing, and at times I felt the need to cover chap­ter titles so that peo­ple around me wouldn’t see them. I can’t really rec­om­mend this book; I’d say that your time would be much bet­ter spent watch­ing some of Penn & Teller’s won­der­ful magic or their in-your-face skep­tic series “Bull­shit!” on Showtime.

In The Chase, Clive Cus­sler for the first time strays from his usual nau­ti­cal focus (although the book’s open­ing scene does take place on a sal­vage boat) and his inter­wo­ven casts of exist­ing char­ac­ters. His new pro­tag­o­nist, Isaac Bell, does take seom cues from the Dirk Pitt/Kurt Austin mold, but he also seems to take some inspi­ra­tion from James West (of The Wild Wild West as well. Bell is a young man from a wealthy fam­ily who, just after the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, is the best detec­tive at the pri­vate Van Dorn agency (mod­elled after the Pinker­ton National Detec­tive Agency.

Bell is called to Den­ver to help in the inves­ti­ga­tion of a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal bank rob­ber known only as the Butcher Ban­dit. The Ban­dit hits banks when they have large amounts of cash on hand, kills all wit­nesses, and always man­ages to dis­ap­pear com­pletely. Bell and his fel­low Van Dorn agents hunt the Butcher Ban­dit and his beau­ti­ful accom­plice through­out the west­ern U.S., involv­ing a train vs. car race through Cal­i­for­nia and cul­mi­nat­ing in a steam loco­mo­tive chase over the Sier­ras, through Nevada and Idaho, and into Montana.

I enjoyed this book more than Cussler’s last few nov­els. It’s fresh sub­ject mat­ter for him, and The Chase has no co-author. I hope that he’ll Write more Isaac Bell nov­els and that he’ll do them him­self, rather than farm­ing them out to his grow­ing sta­ble of collaborators.