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Black Rain is Graham Brown’s 2010 debut thriller and the start of the Hawker / Laidlaw series, eventually folded into his post-NUMA Files work with Clive Cussler. Danielle Laidlaw, a National Research Institute agent, recruits a private Cessna pilot named Hawker to escort a small expedition into the Brazilian Amazon to find a pre-Columbian Mayan site that should not exist that far south. The site, when located, turns out to contain Axis-era research notes left behind by a 1944 Nazi extraction team that vanished into the rainforest.
Brown is working the Indiana Jones / Clive Cussler register, and Black Rain delivers what the cover promises: jungle set pieces, mercenary firefights, period flashbacks, an artifact that hums dangerously when handled. The Amazon procedural (Mayan archaeology limits in Brazilian territory, the actual logistics of moving small teams through pre-deforestation rainforest in 2010) is more carefully done than the genre usually rewards. Where the novel weakens is the romantic subplot between Hawker and Laidlaw, which lands a beat early, and the antagonist whose motivations are familiar.
Recommended for fans of NUMA-style adventure thrillers (Clive Cussler’s Treasure of Khan, James Rollins’s Subterranean) and for readers looking for books like Black Rain at the intersection of jungle-adventure and Nazi-archaeology subgenres. Three stars and a credible series debut.
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