Book Review: The Vault by Boyd Morrison

I enjoyed “Rogue Wave,” an earlier thriller by Morrison, but haven’t read the first in this series featuring Tyler Locke, “The Ark.” In this book, we find a group of thieves robbing an auction house’s storage vault. There's no honor among these thieves, whatsoever! Jordan Orr, the ringleader, is after a woman’s hand made of pure gold, but he also pockets an ancient Greek document, unseen by his partners. Jordan doesn’t hesitate to kill off all three of his accomplices as soon as they’re not needed.

Jordan has fashioned an elaborate scheme that involves kidnapping Tyler Locke’s father to insure Tyler’s cooperation, and also nabbing the sister of a beautiful Greek scholar to force her to help him interpret arcane puzzle pieces. The chase leads from a bomb on a Seattle ferry to England to Italy and to Greece, and involves old radioactive power systems from abandoned Russian lighthouses. Along the way Locke and the Greek scholar must decipher puzzles originally set up by Archimedes to save the lives of the hostages. All this, Jordan hopes, will lead him to the secret of the fabled Midas touch and untold wealth.

Morrison writes with short chapters that make for a fast read, even though this thriller weighs in at over four hundred pages.

Reviewed for Suspense Magazine, fall of 2011