DAN GOODER RICHARD

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It’s the antebellum days of 1847: Correspondent Samantha Swift’s voyage from New York to Hawai’i to return a kidnapped island girl turns deadly as she struggles to survive aboard a transport ship at the center of the very opium and sex trafficking ring she is determined to expose. From a Five Points brothel in Manhattan to the howling graveyard of Cape Horn to the cyclone-of-the-century off Robinson Crusoe Island in the Pacific someone wants Swift dead – and will do anything to make that happen.

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Meanwhile secret agent Jack Dancer’s around-the-world odyssey is driven by orders from President James K. Polk to discover Napoleon’s long-lost Maltese treasure before an unknown foreign power finds the trove – and buys domination in the Pacific poised to threaten the California territory. Duty propels Dancer from the same New York brothel to a stolen notebook in Paris to a Christmas tryst in Cairo and headlong into cutthroats in Zanzibar and reeking death temples in Tahiti.

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But as Swift and Dancer’s separate trails of danger and death interweave nothing can stop the ruthless and murderous drive of their enemies to achieve their ends. Nothing – that is – until Swift and Dancer meet up in the “whaler’s hellhole of the Pacific:” Lahaina, Maui. There they are forced to put aside their mutual dislikes – after they uncover a secret so explosive it could destroy America’s fragile young republic forever. Against all odds Swift and Dancer follow an elusive trail stalked by a sadistic killer determined to beat them to one of the world’s greatest treasures. Only to find themselves in a lost world both wondrous and horrifying where the Hawaiian chiefs have long guarded an ancient secret – until now.

 

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