Moon & Muldoon — James David Buchanan

Veteran author James David Buchanan is back with this harrowing tale of suspense and aerial acrobatics featuring two men who perhaps never should have worked together in the first place.

Casey Moon, a one-time fleet carrier pilot, and Max Muldoon, who came from God knows where and has done God knows what, steal back airplanes. That's Max's more honest view, but then Max in spirit is a jolly pirate while Casey longs for bourgeois respectability. "Steal back," because fifty million dollars worth of stolen airplanes end up in the Third World countries every year, irretrievable as a result of red tape and corruption.

Everyone loves Max, no one loves Casey, including his wife who has given him the longest horns in Key West. Casey, the owner of the three-man firm is cheap, devious, fussy, suspicious, and bad-tempered. He professes to hate Max, who is charming, educated, handsome, easy-going, adventurous, a risk-taker and claims to like Casey.

Business has not been good for Moon & Muldoon, their last rescue mission involving a horse that committed suicide by jumping out of a plane. So when a gorgeous woman comes along with a cockamamie story about her divorced husband stealing her plane and child and taking them to an island in the Bahamas, paranoid Casey knows better, but romantic Max falls for it (and her). Lured into helped her transport a bank robbing gang, the inept, violent crooks knock off a mob bank, sending Organization men after all of them.

They catch up with Casey and make him take them to the robbers' s island hideout. The two gangs compete in a violent, scattered, long-running gun battle, with Casey, Max, and Diana all caught in the middle. If they want to survive, it will take more than Max's charm and Casey's flying skills to pull them out of this tropical fire.