The Race
By Clive Cussler and Justin Scott.
I made the same mistake with The Race that I made with Cussler’s previous three Isaac Bell adventures: I blew through the first half of it in one sitting, then put it down and someone didn’t get back to it for weeks. Call it Cussler syndrome. He grabs me, drags me into the ocean, I break free, I gasp for air. Then I remember I forgot something and plunge recklessly back in.
The Bell books—The Chase, The Spy, The Wrecker and now The Race—are outstanding because they’re upstanding. The hero is loyal to his friends, would never cheat on his liberated-woman fiancée, loves his country and can smell a terrorist half a continent away. He’s Yale-educated. Thanks to a flash-forward coda in one of the books, we know he lives to a ripe old age and has a long and faithful marriage.
How could this goodie-two-shoes derring-do not be boring? Because Isaac Bell’s world-saving exploits happen at a time when the world was becoming connected in ways it never could be before. The adventures occur in and around steam locomotives, ocean liners and (in The Race) airplanes. Bell represents an old ideal of self-reliance. He’s battling Robber Barons, industrialists, inventors and other new breeds of power-hungry scoundrel.
I love knowing that Bell will never succumb to the charms of the comely lasses in distress who bat their eyes at him in every book. It makes for a whole other sort of conflict than what you’d find in a James Bond book. It also provides a momentum that is respite-free, just derring-do after derring-do without any derring-don’ts.