David R Leng

The Kayak, the Metal Detector, and the Gold That Started Everything

Some stories find you. This one found David R Leng on a river in southwestern Pennsylvania.

He was kayaking the Youghiogheny River — a waterway that winds through the same hills where General Edward Braddock marched his doomed column toward Fort Duquesne in 1755 — when he spotted a man working the riverbank with a metal detector. David pulled his kayak ashore.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

"Braddock's gold," the man said, without looking up.

The answer was so matter-of-fact, so utterly serious, that David stood there for a long moment. This was not a tourist. This was a believer. And standing in that valley, surrounded by the same hills that had swallowed Braddock's army whole, David felt something shift.

He had grown up with this legend. The gold had always been out there, somewhere in the hills of his childhood. But watching that man sweep the riverbank, David realized the legend wasn't just history. It was a story waiting to be written.

The Search for Braddock's Lost Gold was the result. Jack Sullivan was born on that riverbank.

Grown in the Shadow of Real History

David R Leng grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, where American history is not something taught in classrooms — it is something you drive past on the way to work. The hills around Pittsburgh hold the bones of the French and Indian War. The fields of western Maryland whisper of Braddock's catastrophic defeat. The rivers carry stories that textbooks condensed into a single paragraph.

He spent decades absorbing those stories, and then started telling his own. The Echoes of Fortune series is the result: historical conspiracy thrillers built on the real buried secrets of American history, filtered through decades of research, personal exploration, and a deep belief that the past is never quite as settled as we've been told.

From the Battlefields to the Wrecks

David is an avid scuba diver who has explored underwater wrecks — the kind of claustrophobic, silt-stirred environments his characters navigate in Shadows Over Cozumel. When Jack Sullivan squeezes through a collapsed Confederate shipwreck searching for a brass tube hidden in the keelson joint, that scene was written by someone who knows exactly what it feels like to reach into a space you cannot see.

He is also a woodworker, a boater, and a family man. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, children, and grandchildren — the people who have patiently endured countless conversations about Confederate gold, cipher networks, and whether General Braddock's treasure is really out there somewhere.

(It might be.)