Fear is the key (published in 1961) - by Alistair Maclean - a gripping tale of a man driven by revenge

Alistair MacLean is a Scottish writer who specialized in writing thrillers and crime stories. He was third son of a Scottish minister and joined the Royal Navy during the world war two. He was a senior torpedo operator at the height of his career. He was in the thick of the war theater during the world war and saw action on many fronts especially the arctic north. After retiring he started penning his novels based on the war he saw and many of them became best sellers. Maclean never looked back as a writer until his death in 1987.
If you read Fear is the Key, be sure to find enough free time because this is one book you cannot afford to put down. This is an intense revenge saga by a wronged man. Talbot, the owner of "Trans Carib Air Charter Co" listens helplessly on the radio, the death wails of his wife, son and his best friend. His plane en-route to Florida is shot down by American Military plane. All he can do is to wait to serve revenge to the perpetrator.
Then the novel cuts to the present with Talbot, standing trial in the court and being sentenced. It seems that in his grief he has turned to a life to crime. But at the moment of sentencing, Talbot escapes, taking a beautiful heiress hostage. The hostage, Mary is the daughter of oil tycoon, General Ruthven. After an intense car race and drama, Talbot manages to escape with the hostage. Soon a reward is announced for his capture and he has many unsavory elements hot on his trail.



A thug, Jablonsky capture Talbot and rescues Mary. Instead of handing Talbot to the police he is released to General Ruthven. Ruthven, who is a millionaire many times over, has a shady past and underhand dealings. Most of his money is ill-gotten and he gives two choices to Talbot, help him recover something precious or die.
Talbot agrees to salvage the precious cargo for Ruthven and Jablonsky is also recruited. Soon the picture becomes clear that the precious cargo involves gold and diamonds with ten million locked in the fuselage of a DC-3 plane which has crashed at the bottom of an oil rig. This is the same plane in which Talbot's wife and son was traveling. This loss of Talbot's is so great that all the gold and the diamonds in the world cannot replace it.
Talbot, like all MacLean leading men is a skilled diver, knowledgeable about the oil rig exploration, an out standing diver and an engineer. He is also a skilled martial arts practitioner and completely a macho man. So Talbot gets his revenge in this intense story of greed, murder and money with out any doubt.
This tale sounds very familiar to many revenge drama's of a wronged man on and off screen, but only Alistair MacLean can pull out an intense thriller through his fast paced narrations. The words whiz past telling us about the car chases, under water explorations, gun battle and murders. Maybe you won't meet a MacLean Hero in real life, so its all the more reason to read about him in this book. And get this book, it's an incredible thriller.