Catching Up

Following a series of personal tragedies, Jonathan Quinn and his former apprentice Nate have parted ways. Both Quinn and his partner Orlando think that Nate will return in time, but their current job won't let them give the relationship the time to heal that it needs. It involves a particular quarry, and the only person to have ever seen that quarry and live is Nate. So in order to complete their freelance mission they will need to team up again, ready or not. But Nate's off the grid and they have to find him, which will turn out to be the easy part of 2018's The Fractured, the 12th Quinn novel.

Quinn creator Brett Battles has been expanding his novel's universe, adding in novels featuring a team of misfits called the Ex-Coms and giving Nate some work and adventures of his own. But the centerpiece has always been Quinn, primarily a "cleaner" who visits what would be a crime scene if it wasn't for his work in disposing of corpses and some of the attendant mess that accompanies whatever events led to their corpsification.

Books 10 and 11, which set up the tragedy mentioned above and its aftermath, were not high points of the series and in a lot of ways, The Fractured represents a return to better things. Quinn has his own team with their idiosyncrasies, and although they are not played as much for action comedy laughs as are the Ex-Coms there's a lighter tone through much of the book that the previous two lacked. Battles also moves the relationship between Quinn and Nate forward through the plot and activity of the book, rather than artificially tacking on resolutions somewhere at the end or waving antagonisms away before things get going. And he creates a plot on which to hang his caper rather than the extended chase scenes that dominated the narratives of Quinn Nos. 10 and 11.

Quinn's behind-the-scenes theater of operating has always made his series a little more interesting than a lot of thriller universes, and even though the jobs he and the team do now are more traditional espionagiatin', with The Fractured Battles managed to right his ship and steer it in a more interesting direction.

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One of the more interesting new additions to the late Clive Cussler's work was his creation of Isaac Bell, a turn-of-the-20th-century operative for the Van Dorn detective agency. Although the author liked to sprinkle crossovers between his numerous series around, the distance in time between Bell and the modern series made that mostly impossible. But in The Gray Ghost, Cussler and co-author Robin Burcell let Isaac start a caper that will be finished nearly a century later by husband-and-wife adventurers Sam and Remi Fargo.

In 1906 Bell thwarts the theft of a Rolls-Royce prototype car called the Gray Ghost, but he is unable to clear the name of the man he believes was falsely accused of the theft. In modern times that unlucky fellow's grandson turns to the Fargos for help in clearing his grandfather of involvement in the Gray Ghost theft -- because the car has gone missing again and it's rumored to be carrying a chest of rare gold coins.

Burcell has made Sam and Remi far more interesting than any of the previous co-authors with whom Cussler worked since she joined the company with 2016's Pirate. This is still a Cussler novel, meaning we don't expect depth in the characters or exploration of the human condition. We expect heros, villains, clashes between the two and characters who daringly do their derring-do with the appropriate amount of sangfroid and quippage. But while Burcell manages to do all of that, she's able to make the Fargos a little bit more than just a cross between Nick and Nora Charles and Indiana Jones. She's also significantly better at writing Remi than her male predecessors.

And she's no slouch on the action, giving the Fargos plenty of scrapes to get into and out of, as well as making skillful use of the device of notes from Isaac's case files that help them in their dual goals of recovering the Gray Ghost and clearing their friend's grandfather's name. As mentioned before the Fargos are by far the frothiest series that Cussler created, but Burcell has managed to make it highly palatable froth.