I’ll say this about books – they do have a certain appeal that is more far reaching than movies or television.

 

With a novel, you can tell a very long story – something that would take an actual mini-series or full blown series for television, and for the most part, certainly wouldn’t cut it on the big screen. You just wouldn’t be able to tell the entire story in the typical two to three hours time you have for a major motion picture.

 

And, to top it off, the reader is able to picture the main characters, locations and so forth in his or her mind. They have an idea how things will look.

 

Quite often, when a book is translated into a different media, such as television or a movie, the reader can sometimes be disappointed by the person chosen for the role of a certain character, or the way a location, piece of technology, etc. happens to appear.

 

Plus, the biggest advantage of a novel is that it is only limited to the authors, and thus the readers imagination.

 

A novel can be very complex, have a twisted plot that seems, at first, to be difficult to follow, and many details can seem totally random until they’re fully brought into the light.

 

Movies and television can do this as well, but many times subtle nuances can be missed or entirely lost.

 

The thing that I really enjoy about the novels written by Jack Du Brul is that they’re not limited to a movie or the television. If they were, they’d lose a great deal.

 

His novels are powerfully written adventures, with far larger than life characters and situations that totally boggle the mind.

 

And, they’re complex… the plots often cover entire decades; take a literal lifetime to come to into play.

 

Oh, and lets not forget that the ramifications that are introduced will quite literally change the face of the world as we know it.

 

I have to admit that for many years most of the adventure novels I’ve read have been pulp – mainly men’s adventure.

 

It wasn’t until around the turn of the millennium that I finally discovered that there were more to adventure novels than Mack Bolan, Deathlands, and others of their ilk.

 

Authors like James Rollins, Preston and Child, Clive Cussler, just to name a handful. These authors helped me learn that there was far more to adventure than generic terrorists, non stop gun battles, fake chest hair and trashy women – you know the kind of things that you typically saw in the long running men’s adventure novels.

 

And I am very glad.

 

Oh, sure, these elements exist in the works by the authors I mentioned, and let’s face it, you kind of need these aspects in order to have a good adventure novel, but they’re usually not as exaggerated as one would expect.

 

Charon’s Landing deals with an old plot set up by the soviets during the cold war in order to cripple the American’s supply of oil.

 

I can’t give away too much as it would ruin the novel for anyone who wants to read it. In fact, what I just said is a pretty major spoiler in on itself, but not enough to ruin it for anyone. After all, the novel is a hefty four hundred plus pages.

 

Jack Du Brul’s hero, Phillip Mercer, once again gets involved in a global spanning plot. An old enemy, having disappeared a year before, re-surfaces once again to try and enact this old cold war plan and to get revenge on Mercer.

 

I’ll admit, I still find it rather difficult to believe that a geologist can be a hero, one that has skills that would put professional soldiers to shame.

 

But, then again, who’d have thought that an archaeologist would have gained such fame – and you know very well who I’m talking about.

 

So, because of this, I can set aside my sceptic views and enjoy the novel.

 

One thing I have to point out – there are characters that are introduced in the novel that are not what they seem at first. I won’t mention any names, but at the beginning of the novel there were two, count them – two characters I thought would turn out to be adversaries going up against Mercer.

 

I was wrong.

 

And I love that! The sign of a great writer in my view.

 

Oh, and if you want location, the novel spans from Washington to Alaska, and even to the Middle East. One of the things I consider integral to a good novel – location, location, location!

 

Clive Cussler wasn’t kidding when he said that Jack Du Brul is a master adventure writer. His books are really worth picking up and reading.

 

5 out of 5