Morgan Kane #31

BLOOD AND GOLD 
as by Louis Masterson

Corgi, 1975
originally published in Norway in 1969

Kane is almost broke, even selling his gun to help repay his debts, when a woman offers him a job, hunting a chest of gold coins lost in the bay. A fools mission thinks Kane but the pay is good so he agrees. But they aren’t the only people searching for this gold; people whom think nothing of killing to remove the competition. Unknown, to Kane, there’s someone else hunting him for other reasons too....

At the end of the previous book Kane handed in his badge and this one carries on from there with Kane scraping a living in a small coastal town. In fact most of the book takes place on the beach or on the sea.

One of Masterson’s strengths is his vivid descriptions of desert landscapes or the oceans. He manages to describe their beauty while never forgetting the harshness that nature can conjure up without warning. In fact it’s the underlying sense of foreboding that Masterson creates in his work, be it about landscape or man, that keeps me coming back for more.

Kane has always been a complex character and right from the beginning you somehow know that the emotional scars he carries are going to be added to in a book that moves swiftly to its brutal ending.

An excellent entry into this series.