Condor's Fury

April 1, 2023

Kurt Austin and the NUMA team are back in the newest entry in the No. 1 New York Times best-selling series, with Brown again taking the reins from the late Clive Cussler. Prepub Alert.

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July 31, 2023
Mind control, 21st-century airships, and mysterious glowing orbs form the core of Brown’s protracted latest entry in the late Clive Cussler’s NUMA Files series (following 2022’s Dark Vector). Off the coast of the Bahamas, the freighter Heron is towing an incapacitated trawler when blinding lights begin to circle the craft and the crew appears to lose their minds, attacking the Heron’s captain before leaping overboard into the sea. Thirty miles away, NUMA director Kurt Austin and his sidekick, Joe Zavala, are aboard a training vessel when they receive a mayday signal from the floundering Heron. Kurt and Joe speed to the rescue, and before long, discover that the Ostrum Airship Corporation has been infiltrated by revenge-bent Cuban supervillain Martin Colon, who’s using one of the company’s helium airships in an attempt to cripple America—but this particular model has far-fetched mind control capabilities that go way beyond the hydrogen-fueled zeppelins of yore. What begins as a standard NUMA adventure grows tiresome quickly as Brown introduces too many secondary villains and fails to sufficiently explain their motives or the mechanics of the book’s central threat. In the end, this bloated adventure resembles one of Colon’s airships: tough to maneuver and sluggish. Series fans will hope the next entry is a return to form. Agent: Peter Lampack, Peter Lampack Agency.

August 1, 2023
Danger abounds in the 20th ocean adventure in Cussler's NUMA Files series. Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala "find trouble the way a prize bloodhound finds a scent," and this time they find it in the seas near Nassau. There, the National Underwater and Marine Agency training ship Edison responds to a mayday call from the MV Heron saying that they're under attack. The ship at first appears to be empty, but once the rescuers explore inside, a group of crazed men attacks them. The crazies are victims of Martin Colon, formerly of Cuban Intelligence and now VP of Ostrom Airship Corporation. The guy's a bad dude with a serious grudge against the United States. He and his henchmen have injected the Heron's crew with tiny microchips, electromagnetic sensors half the size of an average grain of pollen. If you get jabbed with this, your brain imprints and blindly obeys the first voice you hear. And if you're told to kill your friends, you'll kill them if you can. So now that Colon has successfully tested the weapon on individuals, he's ready to go big time. And what better device for spreading the dust-sized chips in the billions than to disperse them from his luxury airship the Condor? It's as big as an ocean liner and lifts with helium, so no fair comparing it to the hydrogen-hindered Hindenburg. Imagine a craft larger than the Empire State Building that lands "as soft as a feather." Indeed, it's "a world-class ocean liner plowing the skies." NUMA sends people to inspect the Condor on the pretext that they might want to purchase a similar airship. To put it mildly, exciting action ensues. Can the NUMA crew head off a psyops attack that would cause mass madness and chaos? Though readers can guess the answer, they'll enjoy seeing the heroes at work in this fast-moving yarn. A worthy addition to an entertaining series.

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