Micki
Browning's debut novel, Adrift
(2017), introduced marine biologist and dive instructor in the
Florida Keys, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who's forced by
circumstances to play amateur detective when divers begin to
disappear around a haunted shipwreck – miraculously reappearing
miles away against the current. It earned the book a spot in Brian
Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and likely
would have given it a pass without that mention or knew it even
existed. Adrift appears a bit too modernistic on the surface
and billed as a suspense thriller, but the fast, character-driven
storytelling had a traditional bend and had all the promise of a
diamond-in-the-rough. So the second and so far last entry in the
series, Beached (2018), was added to the wishlist. A story
that plunges Mer into the murky, watery world of deep sea treasure
hunters and nautical archaeology. Having
now read both Adrift and Beached , I can say this series
is closer related to the adventure genre (Indiana Jones and Lara
Croft get mentioned in passing) that either the traditional detective
story or modern crime novel. Browning
seems to have little interest in murders as the body figuring in
Adrift is in the peripheral of the plot that mainly focuses on
the haunted shipwreck and Beached is basically a treasure hunt
fraught with serious dangers. These both read like Young Adult
mysteries with hints of The Three Investigators ( The
Secret of Skeleton Island , 1966), Scooby-Doo, Where Are
You! ("A Clue for Scooby-Doo," 1969) and The Real
Adventures of Jonny Quest ("The Darkest Fathoms," 1996), but
written for an adult audience as Mer's personal life and issues hold
as much sway over the story as the almost innocent, adventure-style
plots. There's the thriller-like opening of Beached that would
have been hitting a little too hard in a The Three Investigators
novel. Beached
opens on a quiet, sunny day on the deck of the LunaSea during
off season, " today a family of four made up the entirety of the
LunaSea's manifest ," when spots a dark shape in the water.
Mer is still pretty new to the Keys and Captain Leroy Penninichols
tells her the dark shape is probably a so-called square grouper, a
plastic wrapped bale of marijuana, but the package turns out to
contain duct taped bricks of cocaine, a 300-year-old gold contain and
some serious trouble – a GPS tracker. And, pretty soon, they got
company. So they have to race to get the family out of the water,
warn the coast guard and get the hell out of there. Whomever is after
them, they are shooting at the fleeing charter boat until a patrol
boat could escort them to safety. The square grouper was lost in the
chase, but Mer later finds the coin aboard the LunaSea . A
gold coin dated 1733 and inscribed, " Initium sapientiæ timor
domini " (" Wisdom begins with the fear of God "),
which turns out to be a Spanish escudos , a "portrait
dollar," sometimes referred to as a doubloon (" pieces of
eight "). A very rare, valuable coin linked to the legend of the
Thirteenth Galleon ("... an old legend that tells of cursed
gold "). In 1733, a Spanish treasure left the port of Havana,
Cuba, to voyage home, but the fleet was caught in a hurricane and " most of the ships ran aground on the reefs dotting the Keys ."
Supposedly, rumors and legends tell of a thirteenth ship filled with
gold had joined the fleet as pirates mostly targeted solitary ships. The
1733 gold coin proves there's more history than legend to the story
of the Thirteenth Galleon and Mer gets caught between two unsavory,
dangerous characters. A modern-day treasure hunter, Winslet Chase,
who has been bound to a wheelchair ever since an accident during a
rogue diving operation and a modern-day pirate/smuggler, Bart
Kingston. Mer is not the only person who's caught between them. A
Cuban immigrant and ex-archivist from Havana, Oscar, worked in a
government archive and found " the coin, the manifest and a note
hidden in the binding of an old ship log ." After
the high-speed chase scene in the opening chapter and finding the
coin aboard the LunaSea , the pace of the story slows down as
Mer begins to research the coin to dealing with the two treasure
hunters. Not a very pleasant experience. Over the period of a week,
Mer goes from being scared to being extremely pissed (" what a
difference a week made "). She scraped together a team to find
the shipwreck before Chase and Kingston. What follows in the last leg
of the story is a cat-and-mouse game above and under the dark, deep
blue. There are some good underwater scenes and particular likes the
scene in which Mer ("... did most of my research in the Arctic,
studying the biogeography of Arctic cephalopods ") has a moment
with an octopus as she explores its den. But that's about it. Beached
is as simple and straightforward as two opposing parties trying to
find a sunken treasure and completely lacked the detective pull of
Adrift . It really is like a novel from The Three
Investigators series written for adults as the opening, ending
and some of the characterization is certainly not something you'll
read in any juvenile
mystery . However,
it's an interesting direction to take in a series presented as modern
mystery-thrillers and without the necessity of a murder plot, the
stories can focus and workout plot-ideas that would have been merely
secondary plot-threads in an ordinary crime or detective novel. I
also liked the balance between Mer's " Pandora-sized curiosity "
and scientific training, which often lands her in trouble when
applied outside of the controlled conditions of an experiment.
Something that's also reflected in how a sense of realism is applied
to the scrappy, adventure-style plots and how fast things can go
south. So would like to have seen this series develop further and, if
you follow the theme of the book titles, the fourth book would very
likely have been titled Derelict and that can only be a take
on the mystery of the Mary Celeste – which would be the
perfect mystery for this series. Browning appears to have either put
the series on hiatus or abandoned it entirely as she has started a
new, more serious series under the name "M.E. Browning." So what
began as a precarious swan dive for lost treasure could very well
have been Mer's swan song. So
not sure whom to recommend Beached , because readers of this
blog will likely find it nothing more than a contemporary curiosity
with too many modern intrusions. Adrift is much better in that
regards and both remain an interesting take on the thriller/mysteries
of today.
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