Daniel Graham MacCormick—Mac for short—seems to have a pretty good life. At age thirty-five he’s living in Key West, owner of a forty-two-foot charter fishing boat, The Maine. Mac served five years in the Army as an infantry officer with two tours in Afghanistan. He returned with the Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, scars that don’t tan, and a boat with a big bank loan. Truth be told, Mac’s finances are more than a little shaky.

One day, Mac is sitting in the famous Green Parrot Bar in Key West, contemplating his life, and waiting for Carlos, a hotshot Miami lawyer heavily involved with anti-Castro groups. Carlos wants to hire Mac and The Maine for a ten-day fishing tournament to Cuba at the standard rate, but Mac suspects there is more to this and turns it down. The price then goes up to two million dollars, and Mac agrees to hear the deal, and meet Carlos’s clients—a beautiful Cuban-American woman named Sara Ortega, and a mysterious older Cuban exile, Eduardo Valazquez.

What Mac learns is that there is sixty million American dollars hidden in Cuba by Sara’s grandfather when he fled Castro’s revolution. With the “Cuban Thaw” underway between Havana and Washington, Carlos, Eduardo, and Sara know it’s only a matter of time before someone finds the stash—by accident or on purpose. And Mac knows if he accepts this job, he’ll walk away rich…or not at all.

My first book by Nelson DeMille. I don’t read a lot in this genre but kept seeing this book around, so I decided to pick it up: an Army veteran (Mac) who owns a fishing boat in Key West, Florida agrees to help a small group of Cuban Americans (including a beautiful young Sarah) retrieve millions of dollars of hidden money from a cave in Cuba.

There were a couple of things that surprised me about this book:

  1. The emphasis on the romance. That’s not a problem for me! I love romance, and I don’t think many non-romance writing male authors include enough of it. Mac and Sarah actually spend quite a bit of time talking about their relationship. Their feelings develop pretty quickly, but it’s a novel so it’s forgivable.
  2. The descriptions. Again, not a problem for me. I loved getting a feel for the country and setting.

Those two elements together did make the book drag a bit for me — it started and ended strong, but slowed a bit in the middle — but overall it was a fun, easy read. There was a lot of humor in the story, and I enjoyed it very much. Again, I don’t read a lot in this genre, but I suspect you’d enjoy this book if you like Clancy and Grisham type books.

R-rated: for sex (not a lot of it, but one mildly descriptive scene) and swearing.