Overview
Dave Delano didn't spend five years in a Florida prison idling away hard time. His five-year plan aimed to put a million-five into his own pockets. In the former Soviet Union there are a million scams. Most lucrative is money laundering. Refitting U.S. yachts to hide dirty dollars and transshipping them across the Atlantic on huge transport ferries destined for the European playgrounds of the international rich, the mob magically "disappears" the cash, moving it through Black Sea ports and into Russian banks. Dave Delano thinks some of that money should be his. It's a simple matter of hijacking one of those yacht ferries on the high seas. For the Colombian cartel, Europe is a magnet. But landing their cocaine is another matter. When FBI agent Kate Fury gets a hot tip they are shipping it in a hollowed-out yacht hull via transport ferry, she knows she's onto the biggest collar of her career. Boarding that ferry, she's set to pounce. But she hasn't counted on Dave Delano, who has his own personal agenda.Editorials
Library Journal
Narrator Boyd Gaines seems to have an enormous amount of fun with the characters in Kerr's latest thriller, who include mobsters, Russians, porn stars, and assorted ocean-going scoundrels. During his five years in prison, Dave Delano developed a plan: get aboard a sea transport and hijack a large yacht that is smuggling money for the Russian mob. Such a plan takes financing, so Delano turns to the American mob for backing, which they give along with Al, a ruthless button man who is their loan security. Meanwhile, FBI agent Kate Fury and her Kansas-bred, ocean-loathing, oversexed male supervisor are working the same transport looking for illegal drug shipments. And then there is the all-female crew of a yacht owned by a porno film company that is also being transported. Patrons who like Donald Westlake's Dormunder series will enjoy this. Highly recommended.--Ray Vignovich, West Des Moines P.L., IAKirkus Reviews
Versatile Kerr, last spotted scaling the Himalaya in search of hominids and a CIA zealot (Esau, 1997), heads into Elmore Leonard territory in this amusingly overplotted thriller.When he's finished serving his five years for a manslaughter he didn't commit, Dave Delano, with his earrings and Lucifer beard, looks a lot like a pirate, so it makes sense that he'd think of piracy as his way of getting back on the map. Dave knows that American mobsters have started to launder their drug money by hiding it in yachts being ferried across the Atlantic to the new, mob-infested Russia, and he sees no reason why some of that money shouldn't be his. Naked Tony Nudelli, the capo for whom Dave took the rap, agrees to the extent of staking Dave to a boat of his own, so that he'll have some cover for booking passage on the yacht-carrying Grand Duke and a minder, Tony's business manager Al Carnaro, "Colonel Tom Parker with guns and jokes." Dave's not to know, of course, that Tony and Al have ideas of their own, or that the comely lady Dave's about to fall for, Kate Furey, has a cover story as bogus as his own. As Dave plies his romance with Kate, an FBI agent on the transatlantic trail of a cocaine shipment her idiot boss, Kent Bowen, is convinced is aboard the Grand Duke, it's clear that something special is in store for the happy couple.
But they're so evenly matched as liars and banterers, so equally spirited and attractive, and so evenly handicapped by their sidekicks, murderous Al and troglodyte Kent, that you keep waiting, as Kerr unveils twist after twist (porn filmmaker shipmates, a nasty hurricane, an unexpected change in course), to see which of them will finally get the upperhand. It all makes for a heartlessly accurate, if synthetic, copy of Leonard at his most disarming and leaves you wondering just how many more voices Kerr has up his sleeve.