Blood and Treasure by Ryan Pote
A rollercoaster ride of action, adventure, science, lore and technology.
A single eggshell-colored glove moved through the Unity module … Spinning like a ballerina, the glove impacted a padded wall, sending it twirling on its axis through a swarm of floating orb-like marbles and into the Harmony module — the heart of the ISS.
The burgundy-colored spheres stretched and blobbed. Some clung to one another and formed larger orbs, while others multiplied and stained the glove red.
That’s what blood does in outer space.
In Ryan Pote’s Blood and Treasure, a man named Ethan Cain witnesses a remarkable sight off the coast of Mozambique — a space capsule hurtling through the sky and into the ocean near him. What’s inside is even more remarkable — a woman, unconscious and bloodied, but somehow still alive. It is only later that he learns she is the only survivor of the International Space Station disaster — and that the other crew members were brutally murdered.
What happened? Who could have done this? These are only some of the questions swirling around his head. A former special ops pilot, he and his team are treasure hunters, and they are in the middle of the biggest job of their lives: the recovery of an ancient bronze scroll, which in turn will point the way to something much greater. But what? Why is everyone so secretive about it? Why does he keep getting warned not to let it fall into the wrong hands? Whose hands are they, exactly?
And what does it all have to do with the woman who has fallen from the sky? As Cain probes for answers, enlisting both friends and enemies, and some that could go either way, he and his crew have no idea of the astonishing events that will soon envelop them. What’s at stake, it turns out, is more than just ancient objects, or even mass murder – it may just be control of the world.
Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy have passed on, though others continue to explore their worlds. Talented writers such as Steve Berry, Dan Brown, and Brad Thor still spin their complex webs of past and present; of spies, warriors, and conspiracies. And now Ryan Pote joins them to take us on a rollercoaster ride of action, adventure, science, lore and technology; a novel filled with twists and surprises. It is the beginning of a blazing new career.
It’s hardly his first career, though. For many years, Pote was a Navy helicopter pilot, and served as a mission commander in a joint interagency special operations task force in Central and South America. His experiences infused everything in Blood and Treasure.
“It was the foundation for all of it,” he says. “My time with the task force combating transnational criminal organizations gave me the tactical knowledge to weave the story together. I’d worked with every lettered government agency, and more, to hunt bad actors out of Central and South America. We did a lot of work with the NSA. The timber-trafficking angle in the book is something most aren’t aware of as a source of income for drug cartels — it’s not just drugs anymore. There’s a scene in the novel that is a fictional account of a raid in East Africa. My good friend was one of the pilots flying a Dash-8 that day. I wanted to share some of their unknown story and found a way to weave it in and get it approved for release by the DoD. Almost every character is modeled after someone I’d worked with or encountered.”
That includes himself. Ethan Cain has burn scars all over his body, “like the rippling bark of an ancient oak tree.” Asked if there were parts of Ethan that he shared, Pote replied, “In every way.”
“I never wanted to be an author or even gave it a thought,” he says. “I started writing as a journaling exercise from my therapist while working through PTSD. She wanted me to talk about my near-death experiences in a group civilian setting. The problem was, most of the experiences were of a sensitive nature dealing with drug cartels, and I couldn’t share many of them. She advised me to fictionalize the events. It became a very cathartic daily exercise and began really helping me work through my issues. After hearing Jack Carr on the JRE Podcast in April 2020, it inspired me as a former Navy veteran turned author with no writing background. I decided to try my hand at putting all those stories into a work of fiction.
“The result was Ethan Cain. He embodied all the issues I had and allowed me to express them on the page. He became the embodiment of multiple people. One of my most memorable experiences was when my helicopter caught fire inside the cabin. We ended up landing back on the ship in the utter nick of time, but it could’ve ended very differently for me and my crew. Prior to that, a friend of mine died in a V-22 crash in Hawaii and burned to death, and that was on my mind when it happened to me. I also had a friend who was burned severely from his neck to his toes from a crash in flight school, and he spent years in a body cast. His scars, and how people saw them, are very similar to that of the Ethan Cain character. He’s disabled, like me, from a helicopter hard landing, but in a much different way. He has scars on the outside, which everyone can see and cast judgments on, and scars on the inside which nobody can see.”
Pote poured all that into his book. Besides the inspiration of Jack Carr, he also drew upon the influence of other writers he admired, such as Clive Cussler, Louis L’Amour, Michael Crichton, and Dan Brown — and one other, as well:
“I took James Patterson’s MasterClass. To this day, I still reference a sticky note on my desk: ‘Freight train through the first draft.’ It’s the best advice on writing a novel, in my opinion (and Jim’s). So, I write very fast, thanks to his advice, and get the story down on paper. I wrote the first draft of Blood and Treasure in 28 days, Monday-Friday from 4 am to 7 am each day before work. I never stop to go back and edit what I wrote — that’s later. I keep forging ahead and adapt my outline as the story takes its own shape and form.
“That outline varies. Some scenes are very detailed. Some chapters have the scenes all broken up. Others may just be one line: ‘Reveal X and person A gets out of place B.’ But, when I sit to write, I become a ‘pantser’ and rarely even look at the outline until I’m making tweaks for the next several chapters ahead. Tone, rhythm, and theme — these all come in layers. I do many, many drafts, and each one targets a specific one, and I knit the story as tight as possible, to ensure it’s all in the same ‘key.’”
And then came the really hard part — getting published:
“I started writing in May 2020, and it took me three novels before I finaly got an agent at a major literary agency. He went out with two of my novels, and I never heard from him again. That was that.
“I kept writing, getting better, eventually earning a finalist spot for the Clive Cussler Adventure Writer’s Competition, where I met his son and collaborator Dirk Cussler, and a man who became a good friend and writing mentor, Mike Maden. Dirk told me, ‘Don’t stop writing.’ I listened. I took that momentum and kept going. After writing five books with over 400 rejections (I stopped my Excel spreadsheet at 400), I was going to give up after life caught up with me following a personal family crisis. A few months later, I was on the phone with Maden, telling him how I was just going to self-publish and move on when he mentioned an agent at the David Black Agency named Mark Tavani, and said he’d introduce me.
“The book Mark read was my fourth, written while the other Ethan Cain novels were circulating. Instead of sitting around, I figured I’d bet on myself and write a fourth book, but I wanted to push myself to get better and try new things — bigger and bolder. At the same time, I wanted to write it as if it could be the first novel in the series. I knew the characters were there. It started with the idea of this woman who became Mojdeh Zahedi, the woman in the space capsule. I wanted to see if I could write a novel that was built around the mystery of her. Could I keep the reader truly guessing as to whether she was good or bad, until the very end? The result had to be surprising, yet inevitable, and everything she did needed to make sense within that context.
“Then I took some advice from Maden — he once told me that if you could take two good ideas and somehow find a way to make them fit together, you’d have one great idea. So, I did that with three ideas, and the result was a dynamic plot built for the characters I’d already created to inhabit.
“It was Mark who helped me fine-tune the opening of the novel. With an ensemble cast, it’s hard to manage the characters, and he helped steer me into a more grounded opening sequence. And then we went out with the book — and quickly received one offer. And one offer only. The offer was from Tom Colgan at Berkley, however — our dream submission. Tom loved it, but he had some big-picture changes he wanted to see before he bought it. It was a real challenge for me, I won’t lie, but in the end, the book came out better than before, which got me a two-book deal for a series.
“Finally, my film agent Sanjana Seelam of William Morris Endeavor also had solid advice — to lean into the treasure-hunting aspect of the story a little more. All these recommendations came together to transform Blood and Treasure into what it is, a book that I’m very proud of. All these people gave me little nudges and allowed me to fill in the blanks my way. I’m grateful for the collaboration.
“It’s amazing how God has moved in my life. When you finally give it up to Him, He steps in and makes the impossible possible.”
Book Two for Ethan Cain is done, and by the time you read this, Book Three probably will be, too. That’s in addition to “multiple” film and television projects in the works with WME. Whatever the traumas of the past may have been, Ryan Pote’s flight has landed.
Ryan is a 12-year veteran Navy helicopter pilot and mission commander who was part of a joint interagency special operations task force (JIATF). He did three deployments during Operation MARTILLO countering narcotics smuggling throughout Central and South America. Ryan then served as a search and rescue pilot for the US Navy Experimental Test Wing and NASA. After getting out of the Navy, he was a federal investigator for 5 years on prototype aircraft development programs. He currently works for the Navy’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Test and Evaluation Unit.
Before the Navy, he lived and worked in Hawaii as a PADI SCUBA Instructor and lab tech researching algal-biofuels for Shell Oil. Ryan’s been the director of an oil company, a bartender, and even a live musician. He attended college at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and earned a master’s degree in US History and Teaching from Ashland University.
Ryan volunteers his time as a judge for the Clive Cussler Adventure Writer’s Competition. He lives with his wife and children in New England.
Publish Date: 7/22/2025
Genre: Fiction, Thrillers
Author: Ryan Pote
Page Count: 368 pages
Publisher: Berkley
ISBN: 9780593953167