Inca Gold - A Dirk Pitt Novel by Clive Cussler
It’s been a while since I read a regular novel so I tried something new. Dirk Pitt is a character in a number of Clive Cussler books. Pitt is an adventurer extraordinaire. Rugged, handsome, independently wealthy. He is a man’s man. He has a non-exclusive girlfriend, a seductive and beautiful US Congresswoman. Pitt works for US agency called NUMA that is involved in oceanic study.
I think the story is over-the-top but Cussler tells quite a tale. The books starts with the Incas of Peru in 1532 where the defeated brother of the last Inca king (there was a family feud) secreted the remains of the Inca treasure, a vast amount of untold gold and jewels, in the distant Sea of Cortez, in huge underground cavern carved out of a mountain by an undiscovered river that runs under the desert and dumps into the waters between Baja California and Mexico. Francis Drake and the Golden Hind play a part. Then in our day there is a gang of international art thieves, jungle adventures, hovercrafts, classic cars, cold-blooded killers, etc., etc., like I said, kind of over-the-top, but I suppose that is par for the course in this kind of pulp detective/adventure novel.
I wasn’t super crazy about the book but it was good enough to keep me up reading until 3 in the morning last night. Cussler has sold books in 40 languages in more than 100 countries to more than 125 million readers so someone likes him. Some of Cussler’s Dirk Pitt books have been made into movies like Raising the Titanic and the recent Sahara starring McConaughey as Pitt.
Moderately recommended.
http://www.numa.net/clive_cussler.html