A super-evil, swarthy zillionaire locks horns with the super-good, fabulously resourceful Kurt Austin (Polar Shift, 2005, etc.) of the National Underwater and Maritime Agency (NUMA).
It seems there has been yet another age-old conspiracy to cover up a truth which would rock the religious world. This tale is based on the possibility that the Phoenicians, master mariners of the ancient world, were repeat visitors to North America, sailing nearly to Harrisburg, Pa., and on the further possibility that one of those voyages involved a treasure so important that it was necessary to secrete the object not far from what would be the Pennsylvania Statehouse, where it might have rested for eternity were it not for the restless curiosity of President Thomas Jefferson, or for the avaricious lust of cruel, present-day international villain Viktor Baltazar. Baltazar has inserted himself into the life and work of fiery, spunky, Italo-Ethiopian UNESCO employee Carina Mechadi, a woman totally and passionately dedicated to the restoration of Iraqi antiquities dispersed in the chaos of war. The ruthless fiend desperately wants his hands on the ancient statue of a Phoenician mariner that Carina plans to exhibit. Baltazar’s brutal efforts to snatch the statue in the middle of the Atlantic put Carina in the way of a Fate Worse Than Death. Fortunately, NUMA’s number one agent Kurt Austin just happens to be in the nautical neighborhood, where he has been lassoing a gigantic iceberg, and he is more than capable of overpowering Baltazar’s goons. Mechadi and Austin, mutually attracted, team up to find out what’s so interesting about that statue, embroiling them in Baltazar’s machinations from the Bosphorus to Chesapeake Bay. Those machinations include tilting on horseback. No kidding.
A small—very small—step up from Saturday morning adventure cartoons.
