Holding the coin between his forefinger and thumb, he turned it so that the light reflected from it. This was my father’s obsession, he thought, the thing that uprooted him, yanked him away from his wife… finally cost him his life. Here’s the dream – treasure. Pulling his eyes from the coin, which seemed to him as though it were in mint condition, he asked, “A piece of eight?”
“A doubloon, Jack,” she answered, her voice low. “Nick only found three of ‘em, but he was betting there are thousands more.”

The rift between Nick and Jack Gallagher started twenty years ago. Jack felt that any man who left his young son and wife to go off treasure hunting in the Keys wasn’t worth knowing. But when Nick dies in a boating accident, Jack finds that he’s inherited a huge mess. Nick had been closing in on the final resting place of the Santa Maria Magdalena but the funds and the salvage licenses are close to expiring. Jack doesn’t exactly like working with his half-brother, his father’s second wife and their loyal rag-tag crew, but they seem less threatening than his father’s bitter ex-partner and his new backers. There’s a beautiful journalist who seems to honestly like Jack but it’s difficult for him to know who to trust. And then there’s Brenda, the hurricane hovering over the waters where the Magdalena rests. Perhaps the gold is cursed after all.

I grew up on the coast of Florida, watching Cousteau movies and loving the ocean. As a girl I wanted to be a marine biologist but after learning about Mel Fisher’s Atocha find, I started telling people I wanted to be a marine archeologist. But I didn’t have what marine salvage takes and the dream died. Books like Doubloon let me dabble in the dream again. It’s hard to say whether my fondness for the subject matter causes me to look at the material with rose-colored glasses, but I honestly think that if you read early Crichton or Preston/Child then you would enjoy Doubloon too. ( )