Trident's Fury
Matthew Scott Baker
$6.35 Download
$25.95 Hardcover
© 2008
335 pages
At the risk of sounding like a movie review, Trident’s Fury is an enjoyable romp. Suspend your disbelief for 335 pages and just go with the flow and you’re in for a riveting ride complete with pirates, explosions, and ancient runes to unravel. Reading the book, you’ll think you’re at the movies, watching Harrison Ford escaping time and again from avenging Nazis, bent on world domination. Only this time his name is Ethan Darringer.
The plot doesn’t take long to reveal itself, hundreds of years ago pirates had stashed an other-worldly stone deep beneath the New Hampshire coastline and booby-trapped the system of caves that served as an entrance. An earthquake reveals the stone, alerting a squad of modern day Nazis and the US government. The government calls in the Trident Squad, a secret special-forces squad headed by a man named Killian, to secure the stone and keep it from falling into Nazi hands.
A race to the finish ensues as the Nazi commander, Ademaro hunts down Ethan, his girlfriend Kathy and the Trident Squad as they try to solve the puzzle left by the mad pirate Captain. In much of the action, you can picture yourself playing Trident’s Fury in its video game incarnation such as in this description:
The walls of the large cavern were lined with hundreds of rectangular alcoves, each about six feet in length and three feet high. And, each contained a human skeleton. Scattered on the floor throughout the middle of the room were several skeletal remains that appeared as though they had been discarded, tossed aside like they were not important. It was not immediately clear if they were human remains or something else.
For me, the best part of the book was unraveling the puzzles using elements of a poem to decipher clues. The puzzles are increasingly harder. I went from being able to figure out the obvious solution in the first couple to having to let the characters puzzle them out for the last two. This is typical of the characters as they struggle with the clues:
“Each stanza of the poem has given us clues as to how we should navigate these traps. I’m pretty sure this one is doing the same thing, however it’s a little more complex than the previous ones. Let’s start with what the poem says. ‘The hunter rules over all again.’ Now, what does that insinuate to you?”
Killian looked thoughtful.
Trident’s Fury also does Indiana Jones proud in the action scenes which are frequent and not for the faint of heart. Our heroes are constantly captured, disarmed, at wits end, and then miraculously pulling victory from the jaws of certain defeat as in this description:
His men were all still alive, he noted with relief, and were putting up a hell of a fight against the Nazis. Jensen and Wes had somehow obtained assault rifles and had retreated back to the stairwell in the cliff wall. They had then made their way up to the windowed chamber above. The German soldiers had been forced to take cover among the boulders and rocky crags above the pier. Although Jensen and Wes were only a force of two, the strategic advantage of having the high-ground gave the American soldiers the edge they needed to stay alive and to wreak havoc among the German ranks.
Trident’s Fury may be self published, but it’s certainly not for lack of a compelling story to tell and quality writing. I found myself going back and reading this book even when I didn’t really have time. That this is Mathew Scott Baker’s third book isn’t a surprise to me, it reads like a polished and well conceptualized work. The price ($26 with hardcover the only option) almost guarantees you will buy this book as a download ($6.25) which may explain why the cover is a little bland. My recommendation is not to ask yourself too many questions and just let the book be what it is, part puzzle, part treasure hunt, and all action.
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