Matt Royal is a retired lawyer and ex-Army Ranger. He is comfortably well-off financially and lives a pretty quiet and relaxed life on Longboat Key Florida. When his long-time friend and mentor Larry Wyatt is found dead on his deck slumped over the newspaper he had been reading, a bullet hole in the back of his head and neck, the quiet part of Matt’s life came to an end.
The sheriff on Longboat Key will certainly investigate and may even find out who killed Wyatt, but that is not enough for Matt. It is a personal thing and he is compelled to seek his own justice in his friend’s brutal murder.
Wyatt had been in the Special Forces in the Army with Matt, and, in fact had taught Matt all he knew. But he had become a professor at a local university and was investigating the Vichy rule of France toward the end of World War II. That puppet government was guided by the Nazis and had shipped most of the French Jewish people off to death camps.
It turns out that one particular Frenchman, Richard de Fresne was running a neat little operation stripping all the wealthy Jews of their money and jewels promising the get them free before sending them off to be executed. Matt’s good friend was evidently getting a little too close to discovering what was going on way back in Vichy France and someone did not like it.
Matt enlists the help of a couple of his other ex-special forces buddies and begins to track down the killers. The first man they find is a corrupt ex-New York cop. Matt does not intend to kill the man but when a gun is pulled from under a couch cushion Matt has not choice. It bothers him that he killed someone through his desire for revenge and worries him that he might be more like his adversaries than he would like to be. But this man was only the one who pulled the trigger. Before he attacked Matt he did reveal that he was hired by another to do the dirty job. So Matt and his revenge friends began to track down the authors of the murder of Wyatt. All three are determined to do whatever it takes to follow the trail to the ultimate guilty man and exact justice, death if necessary.
The trail leads them to Germany where numerous attempts on their lives come from an Arab source. As they are tracking the killers the story leaps back in time to 1945 at near the end of WWII when an Army OSS Major is seen to be capturing de Fresne and spiriting him out of France eventually to the United States where he makes a devil deal to get half of the $20 Million in loot. He is set up for life back in the US and has the deal sealed with a set of documents that would be turned over to authorities in the event of either his or de Fresne’s unnatural death in order to ensure that neither rats out the other.
These two rich and powerful man are the ultimate source of Wyatt’s death that Matt and his friends seek. On the way they find themselves attacked from every side and many chapters of exciting battle keep the story moving at a rapid clip. “Wyatt’s Revenge” is a fine and fast moving tale well worth reading and earns an 8 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
