Author-adventurer Richard Halifax is declared legally dead on May 28, 1939, after disappearing in the Pacific.
No stranger to danger, the Kansas City-born “world traveler for the stay-at-home crowd” enjoyed a career of arduous hikes, heroic swims and intrepid journeys in planes, trains and automobiles. His last, uncompleted expedition proved to be his most ambitious: a voyage in a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco.
Peter Mann’s second novel opens with the death of its protagonist. Or so it seems. “World Pacific” is an elaborately structured book full of sharp twists and false bottoms. Halifax is no dead man. Indeed, as he gets out of his depth, both at sea and on dry land, in a variety of treacherous scrapes and duplicitous schemes, he feels brilliantly alive.
Halifax relays his story, in a series of installments, to the “pint-sized admirers” that make up the Dicky Halifax Junior Adventurers Club. Shortly after he sets sail, a typhoon leaves him shipwrecked in the ocean. After enduring thirst, hunger and a burning sun, and then resorting to cannibalism, he is picked up by a Japanese whaler and put to work.
Halifax’s trials intensify, first when he is interned in a brutal penal camp on the island of Saipan and later when he ends up in the “torture-chamber-cum-rehabilitation-cell” of Dr. Kanemoto. His captor’s “regeneration therapy” forces him to open up about his past life but also his recent involvement in a dubious operation to solve his money problems.
Unfolding alongside Halifax’s tale is an account by painter Hildegard Rauch, the daughter of Germany’s greatest living writer in exile. In San Francisco, she sits by the bedside of her twin brother, Hank, who slipped into a coma after attempting to die by suicide.
It isn’t long before Hildegard goes from passive observer to active participant. She realizes she is being followed. Then she receives a cryptic, frantic note asking her to break into her father’s library and burn certain documents — including a letter from Halifax.
Mann’s 2022 debut, “The Torqued Man,” also employed two narrators. This time around, we get a third voice, that of Simon Faulk, a disgraced British intelligence officer tasked with rooting out Nazi spies in California. Mann takes a gamble introducing the character’s “testimony” after 170 pages but it pays off. As Faulk strives to settle a score and expose Halifax as an enemy agent, Mann adds fresh layers of intrigue.