A Sword to a Fool (Blake Drysdale, #2)

This is book two of the Blake Drysdale series and follows the Blake and the crew of the Reluctant Bride floatplane into yet another adventure. The story starts back in 1972, as Felix ‘The Cat’ Calloway, a forger, gets caught up in a hit on his supposed client and a member of the gang he was working for. He spotted what was coming from the silent hitman and manged to get away with his life, but only just. He knew ‘The Indian’ was a smuggler who had just brought in goods for the Winter’s brothers, on his floatplane. This is how he met Blake Drysdale, the owner and pilot of the Reluctant Bride floatplane. They were later joined by Sally Freeman and Anton, a Ukrainian. The next part of the story continues in 1975, as the gang get caught up in the removal of a relic from Guatamala, and Blake and Anton end up in a grotty prison.

They are offered the chance to get out of the prison by a man from the Edwards-McQuillen Detective Agency. He is following up on the death of an old friend, retired NYPD detective Frank McQuillen, who was involved with a missing person’s case back in 1972 and was caught up in a gang like execution. The man, Mr Witt, believes that Felix was a witness to his friend’s death. The missing person was a six year old girl called Mary Nagle, who was some sort of savant, in particular with numbers, and was given a ham radio by her parents in an effort to communicate and talk with other people. She obviously heard something and spoke to someone that she shouldn’t have. The evidence that Frank collected from her home, when starting his investigation, showed pages of numbers, but also some nonsense words, probably in code. Blake recognised this as a numbers network, often used by spies!

One of the words he could make out was ‘paragon’. Before they can do much more, a murderous force hits and the group have to flee for their lives. They are now stuck in a battle with the mysterious Paragon Group and get chased all over the world. Accused of murder and with prices on their heads! Blake blames himself for getting Felix noticed by the CIA on a previous job, as it lead Witt to them and the beginning of murderous chaos by a powerful foe. Blake had wanted to make some money then as now, never mind this time that the case seems to be mixed in with a missing young girl! They get followed about everywhere, with killers seeming to know their expected next location, nearly every time and doing their best to do away with them all! Blake will have to let his crew know about the threat coming for them, so they can figure out what to do.

A communication with his old RAF boss and now part of MI6, identifies the assassin and leads them to their first part of the puzzle, travelling to war torn Rhodesia. A massive price is on each of their heads and they are following the path towards the people holding Mary, as the Paragon Group and its fanatical followers seek to carry on with their black-ops and plans for world domination! The ending of the book leaves matters somewhat resolved, but with dangerous people still out there. The group behind all of this, are super powerful and will no doubt raise their heads again under a different name and from a different location. Help from his old friend and those who know of him, save their bacon at some points, but Blake and his crew pay a heavy price themselves. I liked the new bird at the end, the Other Woman, but will have to see what she does in the future. Plenty of action in this storyline, with quite a few shootouts and some desperate situations for the crew to have to fight their way through. A touching connection with the young girl as well, which was nice. I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.