The Philippines is a nation of 7,641 islands and just as many spectacles. June 1991, I was a Marine stationed on Luzon, the chain’s largest island, where fate had ushered me to a front-row seat to an epic adventure. While enduring the fatigue of jungle patrol, I’d befriended a Filipino selling machetes. He’d disclosed to me the suspected whereabouts of a treasure trove rumored to be near the top of the now-infamous Mount Pinatubo.
There is much history about this legendary Golden Lily Treasure, as well as intrigue behind its origin. My new cohort and I soon took a jarring jeepney ride, to board a slow-sinking banca boat that ferried us back to the boonies, where we footslogged toward Pinatubo’s Vesuvius splendor, to unearth our riches in Luzon’s lawless wilderness. Dear Reader, let us agree that a treasure hunt is rousing. We’d found the sealed cave! I could smell the perfume of my soul within…that undeniable fragrance of one’s hopes and dreams. The bigger problem was staying alive to claim it. But, in the end, it didn’t matter. A few days later I was back on filthy jungle patrol. I tasted the unmistakable perfume of treasure that had seeped into my nose and caked to the back of my tongue, as I watched Pinatubo’s cataclysmic eruption blow 500 feet of its summit twenty-two miles into the wild blue yonder.
TYPHOON COAST was inspired by the second-largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, which blew my life of opulence to oblivion. I am writing two more books based upon the adventures of the story’s better than-Hollywood cast of characters finding their way through a lost world filled with danger and close calls. We follow TYPHOON COAST’s main character, Trent McShane, through his lifetime of dramatic happenstance, then see him plucked off his San Francisco police beat and back in the Marines, seizing opportunities to right his life’s tragic wrongs on the trail of a high-stakes mission where heroes, and dubious agents are unveiled.
