Plunder
A teenage boy in 1685 England inherits a mysterious box that takes three keys to open. He only has one, and he can’t just pry the box open, because it’s probably booby-trapped. He has to go to sea to find the other keys.
On page 39, the authors subtly reveal their literary style: “Create stories of your own, not a retelling.” That means they’re going to allow you, the reader, to live it, and not just tell you what happens, and that’s what they do. It’s a linear plot, one exciting scene after the other.
However, the story becomes suspicious when the hero dives off the mast in the middle of the ocean and holds his breath for 90 seconds on the slim chance that there’d be a hundred-and-fifty-pound fish down there that he could wrestle to death underwater with just his bare hands and a knife, and darned if there wasn’t. Then all the shipmates loved him, just like Rudolph. Later he defeats a huge brute of a shipmate in a fist fight by kicking him in the groin, as if the seasoned fighter never saw that coming. About halfway through, I wondered what had happened to the “key” plot.
The story has nothing to do with plunder, and even less to do with keys. It’s all about cruelty, violence, deception, and revenge against colleagues who are theoretically on the same side. The prologue goes nowhere, there are no character flaws to overcome, and it’s not even a true ending.
