Rick Kasten first appears in Shadow Soldiers. The wealthy son of a Costa Rican mother and a German father, he is brought up in New Orleans where his father settled after leaving Germany. With an anglicized last name, he still has relatives in Nazi Germany. We meet Kasten in a Havana bar where he witnesses a love triangle murder.
Embarking the next day on one of his family’s ships for Germany. Among the other passengers on the voyage is a lovely Hungarian patriot attempting to get back to Budapest. Arriving in Europe they are just in time to witness the Wehrmacht is stepping off into Poland and launching the next world war. What ensues is a game of cat and mouse as Kasten uses his family business to extract important refugees from occupied Europe to the safety of the Americas.
In Last Voyage of the Paramaribo Queen, Kasten sets up shop in Lisbon to avenge the murder of his lover at the hands of the Nazis. The action turns from Lisbon to Berlin and then to the Caribbean as he uses his connections to upset Germany’s plans to establish a submarine base on a swamp-infested island athwart the sea lanes leading from the oil fields of Venezuela to America’s refineries.
