The Vault-Boyd Morrison

The Vault
Boyd Morrison
Touchstone, Jul 5 2011, $24.99
ISBN: 9781439181829

Gordian Engineering Special Operations Chief Dr. Tyler Locke was ten minutes into his commute on a ferry from Seattle to Bremerton when his cell phone receives a text message from an unknown caller whose words are answer his phone or die in twenty eight minutes. Locke responds to the person’s next call when he says he planted binary explosives on the ferry and wants Locke to defuse it as a test to prove whether he can handle a special job; failure means death for him and the rest on board. He heads to a truck where he finds waiting for him is Chasing the Past TV host and classical languages expert Stacy Benedict who interprets the Greek instructions so he can defuse the bomb that he created from Archimedes’ geolabe for Jordan Orr and save her kidnapped sister Carol and those on the ferry.

Solving the puzzle with seconds to spare, they learn this pretest is to prove they have a reasonable chance to find King Midas’s lost treasure. To do so the pair will need to interpret the arcane Antikythera Mechanism’s cryptic clues; another puzzling deadly device created by Archimedes over two millennia ago. Failure to find the loot in five days will result in loved ones like Carol being brutally murdered; success will save Carol, but cause mass destruction to others.

The above is just the opening act of an exhilarating action-packed thriller that hooks the audience from the first text message to the confrontations in New York and elsewhere. Readers will never look at the Hudson sediment in the same way as Boyd Morrison provides a taut thriller that never allows the heroes or fans to take a respite.

Harriet Klausner