The Chase

The Chase is Clive Cussler’s 2007 standalone that quietly launched the Isaac Bell series, his historical-thriller line set in the early 1900s. Bell, a Van Dorn Detective Agency operative, is sent after the Butcher Bandit, a serial bank robber who has killed twelve people across the American West and left almost no trace. Cussler loves a steam-era set piece, and The Chase delivers them: a runaway train, a sinking ferry, a chase through San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake. The earthquake chapter is the high point of the book.

Where Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels lean campy, The Chase plays it straighter. Isaac Bell is closer to a competence-porn protagonist in the Mark Greaney / Lee Child mold than the rakish Pitt. The dialogue creaks in places. The romance subplot is purely functional. None of that matters much because the plot is a clean cat-and-mouse with a worthy villain, and the period detail (telegraph forensics, motorcars at the edge of obsolete, period banking) is delivered with the kind of breezy confidence Cussler made his trademark.

Recommended for fans of period thrillers like Caleb Carr’s The Alienist or Erik Larson’s narrative nonfiction (The Devil in the White City), and anyone who wants an Isaac Bell entry point without committing to the later series. Books like The Chase are increasingly hard to find: pulp pacing in a period setting that takes its history seriously. Solid four stars.