Minotaur
Published April 29, 2025
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing
Cold Burn is the second in the A.J. Landau National Parks Thriller series, and it is just as good as the first, Leave No Trace. In both books, the series name with its plural “parks” is appropriate given the multiple settings. This time around, the book’s action moves from Alaska to New Orleans to Fishers Island in New York to the Everglades, and even underwater to a nuclear submarine, immersing us in each of the settings with descriptive and evocative language.
The series’ author, A. J. Landau, is actually a pseudonym for two writers (Jon Land and Jeff Ayers). This works well, since there are two main characters, each of whom is quite distinct and, I’m guessing, written mainly by one or other of the authors. On the one hand, Michael Walker is a special agent for the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch (ISB) while on the other, Gina Delgado is in a unique position as an investigator reporting directly to the president of the United States. In Cold Burn, they are working on two separate investigations which the reader can be sure will merge into one.
As the book begins, Walker is in Alaska, attempting to catch a ring of thieves who have been stealing Tlingit artifacts from Sitka National Historic Park when he is sent to find a missing geological team after an avalanche in Glacier Bay National Park Preserve. Delgado is in Florida, at Everglades National Park, looking into the death of a geologist whose body has been found under unusual circumstances. Aspects of both investigations dovetail with findings from a submarine debacle and the plans of a megabillionaire intent on becoming the world’s first trillionaire. The action is fast and furious, in short chapters, moving quickly from one location and event to another. The reader is often put on hold as the action flips between characters, but it cycles back around so quickly that we don’t lose interest but rather read on to find out what happened next. The end result is a book that is hard to put down.
This is not to say, however, that the characters are given short shrift. Walker and Delgado are both fully developed, as are several of the secondary characters. In particular, the Tlingit biologist, Amka, who works with Walker, is fully developed both as an individual and as a representation of the Tlingit culture that plays a major role in the Alaskan sections of the book. These sections allow the authors to inform us of the history and culture of the Tlingit people as well as the marginalization of native peoples performed by the US govenment when many of the national parks were created. In both Walker’s and Delgado’s sections, we learn a great deal of geologic and biologic science, as well. As the two threads of the novel are woven together with the submarine disaster and the billionaire’s acquisitive actions, at times the science is fascinating and sometimes repetitive.
For much of the book, the action takes precedence and the writing becomes transparent – almost as if it were streaming directly from the page to the reader’s brain’s imagery. However, at moments the writing becomes so beautiful that I just had to slow down to appreciate it. This was especially true in the descriptions of Alaskan snow and ice storms. I enjoyed the entire book, but found Walker’s sections, which provided cultural and geological background, more engaging than Delgado’s sections, which had more of a political underpinning.
The conclusion of the book sets up changes that may occur in the next in the series while also providing a very gratifying resolution to the action of this book. There is no need to have read the first in the series before reading Cold Burn since this book functions well as a standalone. Having read the first, however, I find this a stronger book and one that continues the story of Walker and Delgado very well.