Odel Bernini wades deeper and deeper into treacherous political intrigue, in Richard C. Brusca’s Historical Adventure novel, In the Land of the Feathered Serpent.
This story, like the feathered serpent itself, moves time and space to visit an era remembered by many Americans as one where the U.S. government worked to destabilize several Central American regimes who were at odds with its politics.
A young Odel works as chief curator of a world-renowned natural history museum in Seattle, an occasional teacher at a college in nearby Tacoma, and an archaeology hobbyist. His marine biology fieldwork in support of his specialty – the documentation of crustaceans in Central America – brings him time and again to nations long under the political sway of the United States, especially Nicaragua and Guatemala.
Revolutions and counterrevolutions create governments and insurgents that brutalize the local populations, especially the indigenous people. Prodded by his wife, the daughter of an American cultural attaché, Bernini approaches the CIA to ask whether it might fund his continued research in the region in exchange for “some silly things” he could do for them.
Those “silly things” lead to funding from a foundation to cover his travel, but with strings attached.
He collects crustaceans and intel. Having sold his soul, he gradually undertakes more dangerous tasks on the CIA’s behalf. Like a frog placed into room-temperature water, it is almost too late before he realizes that the burner has been lit. In addition to the growing peril to his life, Bernini falls for a devastatingly gorgeous woman he meets in a hotel bar, on the eve of his first assignment.
As things grow more complicated, the malicious Guatemalan army tears through the jungle looking for Bernini. He must contend with the wildlife buzzing and slithering around him in the dark and hopes he can escape – right up until he meets a venomous fer-de-lance snake.
Author Brusca delivers modern man’s Odyssey, both in scale and complexity.
We are riveted to this man’s journey of self-discovery through challenging times as he navigates the siren calls of the CIA and impossibly beautiful and sexually adept women while his mundane life as an academic and museum curator disintegrates. The lead character’s descent into calamitous Central American politics and American foreign policy plays foil to erotic scenes with his wife back home in Seattle, a darkly fascinating and even more beautiful seductress in Central America, and a final twist coupling with a yet more mysterious and enigmatically enthralling woman.
Author Brusca has an effortless style that draws the reader in and manages to convey needed facts of science, political history, and geography that quickly absorb the reader. Brusca delivers a mega-novel that will resonate with readers drawn to sensually charged, clandestine storylines that run through dangerous political landscapes and treacherous jungles. In the end, much like the heroes he echoes, Odel Bernini, is a super-heroic Indiana Jones archetype with a whole bunch of sexy Bond on the side.
In the first several pages of Chasing Demons, a novel of the Old West not long after the American Civil War, the following happens to U.S. Army Private Gus O’Grady: he kills two Apache Indians, saves the lives of a troop of U.S. soldiers, kills two more Indians, kills a bad guy, winds up being mistaken for a man who may have robbed a bank of $20,000 in gold, and gets arrested for possibly being the man who raped a lass in an Arizona town populated by Mormons, and meets a woman he thinks is far too good for him. Oh yes, and he deserts the Army after 13 years.
