The Bootlegger

January 13, 2014
The Prohibition era provides the backdrop for bestseller Cussler’s spirited seventh Isaac Bell adventure (after 2013’s The Striker, also coauthored with Scott), in which Comintern agents scheme to take over America. Soviet operator Marat Zolner has set up a bootlegging business on the East Coast designed to reap massive profits to fund the Bolshevik plot. Using a powerful, well-armed speedboat named Black Bird, Zolner and his cronies wreak havoc on rumrunners and the U.S. Coast Guard alike. After Joseph Van Dorn, founder of New York’s Van Dorn Detective Agency, gets shot up in a running gunfight on the high seas, Isaac, Van Dorn’s chief detective, takes control of the investigation, which ranges around the world before the final, fiery confrontation with Zolner back in New York. Early books in this series were near parodies of period potboilers, but more recent entries will impress thriller readers as laudable historical action novels. Agent: Peter Lampack, Peter Lampack Agency.

January 15, 2014
The seventh page-turner in the Cussler series featuring indomitable detective Isaac Bell. World War I's over. Prohibition's law. The Van Dorn Detective Agency is helping the Coast Guard chase rumrunners and bootleggers, but it's rough sailing. Boatloads of money are being used to corrupt police, Coasties and even weaklings in Van Dorn's agency. Things turn critical quickly when Joseph Van Dorn himself is gravely wounded in a shootout at sea. He charges his No. 1 man, Isaac, with keeping the agency running, but Isaac's more interested in finding Joseph's assailant. Cussler/Scott do a bang-up job with characterizations in this historical action tale, beginning with Isaac, the Jazz Age James Bond; Isaac's protege, beautiful former librarian Fraulein Privatdetektive Pauline Grandzau; and Marat Zolner, a Comintern operative who believes rumrunning can aid in overthrowing the international bourgeoisie. The plot's believable, and there are fistfights, knifings or a Lewis gun spitting bullets page after page. The action shifts from New York City's docks to luxury hotels where Isaac entertains his movie-star wife to Long Island estates. Cussler and company love historical factoids--across the Long Island landscape, bootleggers and others prowl in Pierce-Arrows, Packards and Rolls Royces. Marat's a worthy adversary, one so amoral as to murder fellow apparatchiks sent to keep him from going rogue. There are gangs--White Hands, Black Hands and Purple Gang--flinging lead as Isaac chases Marat from NYC to Detroit (where liquor arrives from Canada via an under-river tunnel) to Miami to the Bahamas and beyond. Great fun from one of the better Cussler series.

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March 1, 2014
In the seventh Isaac Bell novel, it looks like Bell's life is about to fall into chaos. His boss, Joseph Van Dornhead of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, a fictionalized version of the Pinkerton operationhas been shot and could die. There was a witness, but he is killed before Bell, one of Van Dorn's key operatives, can interview him. Prohibition is the law of the land, but, thanks to corruption in the country's police forces (not to mention in the Van Dorn agency itself), the criminal element is perhaps more powerful than ever before. Can Isaac find out who's responsible for nearly killing Van Dorn and bring down an organization that has nothing less than anarchy in America as its goal? As always in this series, the novel is very exciting, with excellent pacing and some very well drawn characters. With his combination of mental and physical prowess, Isaac Bell could easily become a sort of superhero (imagine a blending of Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage), but the authors do a nice job of keeping him from crossing that line. Another fine entry in a strong series. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cussler is a perennial A-lister, popularity-wise, and his Isaac Bell novels are the pick of his prodigious litter.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013

Seventh in the Det. Isaac Bell series, the only Cussler series set in the past, this volume opens in 1920. Prohibition has bred bootlegging, and Isaac gets involved when his boss is nearly killed chasing down a rum-running vessel.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2014

It's the 1920s, and Prohibition has Joseph Van Dorn, founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, offering his protective services to the Coast Guard to help stop the bootlegging on New York's Rum Row. But Van Dorn is shot and critically injured during a gun battle with a rum-running high-speed boat. Isaac Bell is left to run the agency for his boss, and he sets out to find out who shot the boss, but there is more to these bootleggers than meets the eye. Reports from the streets say they could be Russian gangsters trying to move in on the locals' territory, but why? Only with Bell's sharp detecting skills and some explosive action that takes us from New York and Detroit to the Caribbean and a hurricane can this mystery be solved. VERDICT Cussler and Scott have written another wonderful page-turner with this seventh entry in the Isaac Bell series (The Striker). This is historical action-adventure fiction at its rip-roaring best! [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/13.]--Cynde Suite, Bartow Cty. Lib. Syst., Adairsville, GA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014

It's the 1920s, and Prohibition has Joseph Van Dorn, founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, offering his protective services to the Coast Guard to help stop the bootlegging on New York's Rum Row. But Van Dorn is shot and critically injured during a gun battle with a rum-running high-speed boat. Isaac Bell is left to run the agency for his boss, and he sets out to find out who shot the boss, but there is more to these bootleggers than meets the eye. Reports from the streets say they could be Russian gangsters trying to move in on the locals' territory, but why? Only with Bell's sharp detecting skills and some explosive action that takes us from New York and Detroit to the Caribbean and a hurricane can this mystery be solved. VERDICT Cussler and Scott have written another wonderful page-turner with this seventh entry in the Isaac Bell series (The Striker). This is historical action-adventure fiction at its rip-roaring best! [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/13.]--Cynde Suite, Bartow Cty. Lib. Syst., Adairsville, GA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.