Published by Touchstone on July 5, 2011
Like James Bond movies, some thrillers ask the reader to accept the unbelievable for the sake of enjoying a fun story. The reader's willingness to suspend disbelief is a function of the payoff -- that is, the more farfetched the plot, the more enjoyable it must be if the author doesn't want to lose the reader entirely. Boyd Morrison stretches the limits of plausibility nearly to their breaking point in The Vault, but the result is just as entertaining as the early Bond movies. A part of the novel, in fact, is almost a homage to Goldfinger.
Jordan Orr steals an ancient manuscript from a vault. Eighteen months later, Carol Benedict and recently retired General Sherman Locke are abducted, while Carol's sister Stacy and Sherman's son Tyler are on a ferry with a bomb that's twenty minutes away from exploding. All of this is orchestrated by Orr, who needs Stacy's expertise in ancient Greece and Tyler's engineering skill to help him solve the puzzle of the Archimedes codex and find the Midas Touch -- that is, the power to transmute objects into gold. To further complicate the plot (or maybe just to add a need for speed), Orr is in a race with a beautiful and deadly woman named Gia (a/k/a "The Fox") to recover the Midas Touch from its hiding place in Naples, and thus gives Stacy and Tyler only four days to do the job. Throw in an Italian crime family and a weapon of mass destruction and you've got yourself a thriller.
If you think all of this adds up to a wildly improbable premise, I agree with you. If you can overcome your skepticism, however, The Vault tells a surprisingly entertaining story. With the help of Tyler's co-worker and war buddy Grant, Tyler and Stacy begin a quest that takes them to the Fox's London lair, to a car chase on Germany's autobahn, to a museum heist and a shootout at the Parthenon in Athens, and to a series of violent confrontations in Naples. I was worried that the novel was heading toward a predictable finish, but there's nothing predictable about this story. A little silly, maybe, but I give Morrison credit for putting together a fun, exciting tale.
The Vault moves like the Ferrari that Tyler races on the autobahn. Morrison provides a wealth of interesting information about Archimedes without slowing the plot. He clearly did his research, not only into ancient history but into architecture, steganography, engineering, explosives, extremeophiles, and how to steal strontium-90. He even came up with an explanation for the Midas Touch. I'm no scientist and therefore can't evaluate the explanation but I'm nonetheless -- shall we say -- dubious. Still, the story works so well as an action-thriller that I was willing to set aside my doubts. More troubling is a complicated bit of subterfuge in which Tyler engages toward the novel's end, supposedly without being seen by the adversaries who were guarding him. That the adversaries would be so remarkably unobservant was inconsistent with their behavior until that point and just a little too convenient for our intrepid hero.
Morrison's writing style is unburdened by clichés. His characters aren't deep -- the male characters are standard ex-military Ranger types who are adept at flying planes, racing cars, and defusing bombs, while the lead female is plucky and smart -- but this book is all about plot; the characters exist only to move the story along. This isn't the kind of writing that wins literary awards (just as James Bond movies don't win Oscars), but it is the kind of high energy writing that entertains thriller fans. It worked for me.
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