Destruction Island: Earl Armstrong Series Book 2

by Fredrick Cooper

Overview

Tribal Forester, Earl Armstrong, inadvertently learns about the mysterious and tragic history of an obscure island where his great-grandfather was the first lighthouse keeper in Fredrick Cooper's thrilling new novel, Destruction Island. The author has released a sequel to his award-winning and debut novel, Riders of the Tides, that once again delivers fast-paced action, interesting characters, sharp dialogue, and vivid settings on the extraordinarily beautiful Washington coast. Earl has haunting, and all too real dreams, of his great-grandfather's spirit asking him for help. His attempts to ignore these ghostly pleas are shattered after he discovers the murdered body of a Native American man and then an attempt on his own life and his wife's. Realizing he cannot neglect the island's troubling past and the possibility that it is connected with his own predicament, Earl enlists the help of the victim's brother and an old Indian shaman to uncover his ancestor's long kept secret. In doing so, he must outwit a vicious treasure hunter and his men who are seeking a rare and priceless Native American artifact, as well as a desperate woman who is attempting to escape death at the hands of the Japanese mafia by recovering of a small fortune adrift off the island's coast. What she is searching for is part of a huge mass of tsunami debris that is threatening to result in an environmental disaster on the coast of Washington State and the Isle of Sorrow-Destruction Island.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780988198333
Publisher:	Fredrick Cooper
Publication date:	07/26/2014
Pages:	470
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

Fredrick Cooper is a true native of the Pacific Northwest and a member of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. In addition to being a writer, he spends his time on his boat cruising in Alaska and British Columbia and in his workshop where he also expresses his creativity in traditional Native American woodcarving.

Cooper, a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association and Oregon Authors, is hard at work on a sequel to both Destruction Island and Riders of the Tides, a title that recognized him with a 2013 IPPY award for Best Regional Fiction: West-Pacific Region and a Beverly Hills Book Award finalist in the new fiction category.

Editorial Reviews

2014-10-07
In Cooper's (Riders of the Tides, 2013) second thriller featuring tribal forester Earl Armstrong, a wealthy man resorts to murder and kidnapping to find an ancient mask on an island off the Washington coast. While volunteering for the Pacific Northwest section of the Miyako Project, an organization created to help clean up debris from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Earl finds a corpse in the surf. An autopsy suggests possible homicide, and Earl realizes that the dead man, Will, may have been killed on Destruction Island, a marine reserve. Will's brother, Leon, has the same suspicion, and after strange men spot Leon on the island, someone tries to blow up his boat. It turns out that billionaire antiquities collector Juno Betar is searching for a ceremonial mask hidden in a cave on the island. Earl has "vivid dreams" involving his great-grandfather, Christian Zauner, the island's first lighthouse keeper, and in one of them, he witnesses the discovery of the mask in the late 19th century. Once Juno learns that Earl may know the mask's location, the forester and his family become targets. Meanwhile, a Japanese woman named Norika Edo is looking for a ship's escape pod, lost during the tsunami. The pod contains her husband's body, but it turns out that yakuza gangsters are after something else in the vessel—a small fortune in diamonds and bearer bonds. Cooper's novel boasts suspense with a touch of mysticism, along with exciting scenes of chases, murders and kidnappings. Norika and her team's hunt puts them in the same vicinity as the other characters, but their plots don't converge until near the very end. Overall, the story of Earl and Juno is more riveting, as Norika's tale isn't as fully developed. Still, both stories have memorable moments, as when yakuza boss Yuri Matasuba reminds Norika of her husband's debt, leaving her with fewer fingers; and when other characters undertake an aquatic attack in underwater caves. Along the way, Cooper also adds nice, spoiler-free references to Earl's first adventure. An exhilarating thriller that will have readers demanding another sequel.

Kirkus Reviews