When Dan reaches the deserted houseboat anchored off-shore, he finds a goat, shaven and throat slit, in one of the bunks. Suspecting more bad news, he dives off the boat and finds the bodies of two young women, tethered to the ocean bottom. He contacts the authorities.

Petrie then asks Dan to locate Falconer. Dan concludes from Petrie’s cryptic remarks that Falconer has been abducted and there’s been a ransom demand. He’s given bearer bonds to use as the ransom, and he flies to an island in the Bahamas. It appears that Falconer is being held captive on a ship by several men headed by a mysterious figure named Raven Ahriman. Dan’s attempt to ransom Falconer is thwarted by Leroy Karpe who claims to also be working for Petrie, and Dan is briefly taken captive himself.

The ransom amount is raised.

Falconer’s sister arrives in Florida, and Tom Petrie becomes involved with her. It is revealed that Falconer, who has a somewhat shady past, was trying to produce a movie. When Dan and Petrie view the tapes, they discover some ugly truths. And Ahriman has some deadly plans.

This is the first in a series featuring Dan Shaw, and it works better as a set-up for successive books than as a stand-alone book. Dan Shaw is a character who is firmly in the thriller hero tradition – manly, cerebral, highly capable of holding his own against bad guys in nearly each and every situation. Readers of authors such as Clive Cussler, Lee Child, and James W. Hall will recognize his type immediately. In case there’s any doubt that Dan is cut from the classic mold, there’s a minor subplot about his serving a subpoena on a lowlife who takes it personally as well as an introduction to his girlfriend, Martina Karras, who, in Dirk Pitt fashion, lives in a renovated lighthouse and whose main purpose seems to be to establish that Dan has his sexual orientation straight.

Raven Ahriman is also straight from central casting. He’s one of those arch-villains whose depravity knows no bounds and is evil through and through. A plot weakness is that it’s no secret that he’s a bad guy, but the good guys don’t take him seriously and stupidly put themselves in danger.

The advantage of first person narrator is that the reader usually gets to know the narrator through his thoughts. Nevertheless, there’s a certain distance between Dan Shaw and the reader that the point of view never bridges. For all the internal insight the reader gains, it may as well have been written in third-person.

Ron Faust is a respected author with a long backlist. Dead Men Rise Up Never (the title is also the title of one of the book’s four parts) is an acceptable thriller but is not strong enough to earn a recommended rating. Perhaps further installments in the series (the next one is due to be published in September) will build on this beginning.

--Lesley Dunlap