Where Dane Maddock Channels Pitt and Reacher

Dourado by David Wood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very entertaining action adventure novel.

A little Dirk Pitt, a little Indiana Jones, a bit of Reacher--this has good bones. It's more pulp fiction than bestseller, but I like it fine that way.

The main characters, Dane Maddock and his SEAL friend Bones, take on a mystery presented by the daughter of an old Navy friend. Her late father had clues leading to an old shipwreck supposed to contain an artifact that went missing about 200 years earlier. Other people are searching for it and want to stop Maddock from finding it. The search takes them underwater, to old libraries, and to Petra, with unknown enemies dogging them the whole way.

It has brisk pace and is filled with exciting action. The prose can be a bit jagged, which is all that kept me from giving it a 5, but it's a fun 4. There's a bit underground that got a little repetitious, but then it rocked again. I can't remember if I got this signed at Comicon in Phoenix or at the Doc Savage convention I visited once, but either way, I liked it better than Doc Savage. The copy I bought has 3 other short-ish novels in it, and I'm hyped to read them. And the guy has a huge catalog, so I'm pretty hopeful after this introduction.

Not to oversell. It's just a solid, entertaining action story (with some cool fantasy stuff at the end) intended to be gulped in a short time. Recommended for that kind of reader.

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