Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this engaging first in a new series from bestseller Cussler (Inca Gold) and Blackwood (An Echo of War), Sam Fargo and his wife, Remi, trade quips while wading waist deep in a Maryland swamp in search of hidden treasure. The couple stumble across a WWII Nazi minisub, which contains an intact bottle of wine, apparently part of a collection known as Napoleon's Lost Cellar. The bottle has a riddle hidden in its label, the solution to which leads the Fargos to other lost bottles and eventually points the way to two solid gold Persian columns discovered by Napoleon and hidden in the Pennine Alps in 1800. The book's villain, Hadeon Bondaruk, who covets the columns and will do anything to get them, sends his henchmen after the Fargos. The clever duo manage to stay one small step ahead of the hired killers until everyone arrives at the inevitable boffo ending. Solidly in the Cussler tradition, this adventure thriller is sure to please new fans and old. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
If you're reading a novel, and you meet a fella called Hadeon Bondaruk, you just know it: this guy's a villain. Villains get the really cool names. Our heroes, on the other hand, a husband-and-wife team of professional treasure hunters, are Sam and Remi Fargo, OK names but not as memorable which kind of describes the novel, too: OK but not memorable. While exploring the Great Pocomoke Swamp in Delaware, Sam and Remi find, hidden away at the edge of a river, a World War II-era German mini-submarine. But how did it get there? And could the bottle of wine they find inside the sub really be part of a set of bottles on which the emperor Napoleon fashioned a map showing the hidden location of a pair of solid gold pillars, originally hidden in the Pennine Alps 2,500 years ago? Well, of course it could, and soon the Fargos are fighting for their very lives against the enormously powerful Bondaruk, who has a real taste for some old wine. The story moves at a brisk clip, and Hadeon is a scenery-chewing villain, but, finally, the book feels flat. If you read thrillers, you've seen most of this before, and done better, too (imagine, say, what James Rollins might do with this story). For Cussler devotees.--Pitt, David Copyright 2009 Booklist
