ARC Review: Skyring Water by Beau L'Amour & Louis L'Amour

Skyring Water
Author: Louis L'Amour & Beau L'Amour
Publication: Bantam (June 2, 2026)

Description: Louis and Beau L’Amour present a collaboration across time, an epic novel of Cold War suspense, as a pair of unlikely heroes, a woman without a name, and the undefeated agents of the Third Reich find themselves locked in a deadly race to control the greatest secret of the 20th century.

1961. The world is on the brink of nuclear war. Walls are dividing East and West. Empires are crumbling. And in Barcelona, chaos is unleashed when a rogue officer of the East German STASI attempts to blackmail a pair of struggling arms dealers. The secret—30 tons of stolen gold hidden in an icebound wilderness at the end of the world.

Mike Fowler is a former Navy salvage diver and OSS assassin. Anton Voss is an expatriate German scientist whose past grows darker the closer anyone looks. Once they might have been enemies, yet the two share an inseparable bond; they have saved one another's lives. But all of that is put at risk when Mike discovers Anton standing over a midnight visitor with a gun in his hand.

Now they're on the run, allied with gangsters, pursued by the CIA, Israeli intelligence, and a shadowy cabal bent on creating an invisible empire. The trail leads from the rain-soaked docks of Marseilles to the futuristic towers of Caracas and the ruins of a secret island laboratory in Argentine Patagonia. The only way for Mike Fowler to save his oldest friends, and the woman he loves, is to unlock a decades-old mystery buried in his partner’s Nazi past . . . before it destroys them all.

Includes a special postscript by Beau L'Amour detailing the history of the original unpublished manuscript and the process of collaborating with his father both before, and after, his passing.

My Thoughts: SKYRING WATER is and epic spy/espionage novel that travels the world from France to Israel to Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego. It is populated by Nazis, a lovely member of the Mossad, CIA agents, and Australian salvage divers. It is set in 1961 but has flashbacks back to the 1940s. 

The main character in the story is Mike Fowler who is a former Navy salvage diver and a current arms dealer with his partner Anton Voss. Voss is a former Nazi scientist who is holding a secret that all the world wants and is willing to kill for. 

He convinces Mike that he knows of the existence of a scuttled sub holding millions of dollars in gold bars that the Nazis got out of Germany at the end of World War II. The purpose of the loot was to fund the next Reich which had already been seeded by undercover Nazis filtering their ways into business and industry all over the world. 

This story is about the expedition to uncover the treasure - which is not gold bars. The sweeping epic with a huge cast of characters reminds me both of James Bond and the works of Tom Clancy. It had bunches of morally ambiguous characters including the main character and it had long, involved descriptions of various weapons. 

Fans of the old-fashioned sort of thrillers will enjoy this book. I especially enjoyed Beau L'Amour's explanation of how this story came to be.

I received this one in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. You can buy your copy here.