Micki Browning's debut novel, Adrift (2017), introduced marine biologist and dive instructor in the Florida Keys, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who's forced by circumstances to play amateur detective when divers begin to disappear around a haunted shipwreck – miraculously reappearing miles away against the current. It earned the book a spot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and likely would have given it a pass without that mention or knew it even existed. Adrift appears a bit too modernistic on the surface and billed as a suspense thriller, but the fast, character-driven storytelling had a traditional bend and had all the promise of a diamond-in-the-rough. So the second and so far last entry in the series, Beached (2018), was added to the wishlist. A story that plunges Mer into the murky, watery world of deep sea treasure hunters and nautical archaeology.
Browning seems to have little interest in murders as the body figuring in Adrift is in the peripheral of the plot that mainly focuses on the haunted shipwreck and Beached is basically a treasure hunt fraught with serious dangers. These both read like Young Adult mysteries with hints of The Three Investigators (The Secret of Skeleton Island, 1966), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! ("A Clue for Scooby-Doo," 1969) and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest ("The Darkest Fathoms," 1996), but written for an adult audience as Mer's personal life and issues hold as much sway over the story as the almost innocent, adventure-style plots. There's the thriller-like opening of Beached that would have been hitting a little too hard in a The Three Investigators novel.
Beached opens on a quiet, sunny day on the deck of the LunaSea during off season, "today a family of four made up the entirety of the LunaSea's manifest," when spots a dark shape in the water. Mer is still pretty new to the Keys and Captain Leroy Penninichols tells her the dark shape is probably a so-called square grouper, a plastic wrapped bale of marijuana, but the package turns out to contain duct taped bricks of cocaine, a 300-year-old gold contain and some serious trouble – a GPS tracker. And, pretty soon, they got company. So they have to race to get the family out of the water, warn the coast guard and get the hell out of there. Whomever is after them, they are shooting at the fleeing charter boat until a patrol boat could escort them to safety. The square grouper was lost in the chase, but Mer later finds the coin aboard the LunaSea.
A gold coin dated 1733 and inscribed, "Initium sapientiæ timor domini" ("Wisdom begins with the fear of God"), which turns out to be a Spanish escudos, a "portrait dollar," sometimes referred to as a doubloon ("pieces of eight"). A very rare, valuable coin linked to the legend of the Thirteenth Galleon ("...an old legend that tells of cursed gold"). In 1733, a Spanish treasure left the port of Havana, Cuba, to voyage home, but the fleet was caught in a hurricane and "most of the ships ran aground on the reefs dotting the Keys." Supposedly, rumors and legends tell of a thirteenth ship filled with gold had joined the fleet as pirates mostly targeted solitary ships.
The 1733 gold coin proves there's more history than legend to the story of the Thirteenth Galleon and Mer gets caught between two unsavory, dangerous characters. A modern-day treasure hunter, Winslet Chase, who has been bound to a wheelchair ever since an accident during a rogue diving operation and a modern-day pirate/smuggler, Bart Kingston. Mer is not the only person who's caught between them. A Cuban immigrant and ex-archivist from Havana, Oscar, worked in a government archive and found "the coin, the manifest and a note hidden in the binding of an old ship log."
After the high-speed chase scene in the opening chapter and finding the coin aboard the LunaSea, the pace of the story slows down as Mer begins to research the coin to dealing with the two treasure hunters. Not a very pleasant experience. Over the period of a week, Mer goes from being scared to being extremely pissed ("what a difference a week made"). She scraped together a team to find the shipwreck before Chase and Kingston. What follows in the last leg of the story is a cat-and-mouse game above and under the dark, deep blue. There are some good underwater scenes and particular likes the scene in which Mer ("...did most of my research in the Arctic, studying the biogeography of Arctic cephalopods") has a moment with an octopus as she explores its den. But that's about it. Beached is as simple and straightforward as two opposing parties trying to find a sunken treasure and completely lacked the detective pull of Adrift. It really is like a novel from The Three Investigators series written for adults as the opening, ending and some of the characterization is certainly not something you'll read in any juvenile mystery.
However, it's an interesting direction to take in a series presented as modern mystery-thrillers and without the necessity of a murder plot, the stories can focus and workout plot-ideas that would have been merely secondary plot-threads in an ordinary crime or detective novel. I also liked the balance between Mer's "Pandora-sized curiosity" and scientific training, which often lands her in trouble when applied outside of the controlled conditions of an experiment. Something that's also reflected in how a sense of realism is applied to the scrappy, adventure-style plots and how fast things can go south. So would like to have seen this series develop further and, if you follow the theme of the book titles, the fourth book would very likely have been titled Derelict and that can only be a take on the mystery of the Mary Celeste – which would be the perfect mystery for this series. Browning appears to have either put the series on hiatus or abandoned it entirely as she has started a new, more serious series under the name "M.E. Browning." So what began as a precarious swan dive for lost treasure could very well have been Mer's swan song.
So not sure whom to recommend Beached, because readers of this blog will likely find it nothing more than a contemporary curiosity with too many modern intrusions. Adrift is much better in that regards and both remain an interesting take on the thriller/mysteries of today.
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