By R.G. Belsky
Imagine you’ve just written your debut thriller novel and are already getting rave reviews and lavish praise from best-selling icons of the genre before it’s even published. That’s the dream scenario that has happened to Ryan Pote with his first book Blood and Treasure.
Mark Greaney calls Blood and Treasure “the must-read debut thriller of 2025, evoking equal parts Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy.” Steve Berry says, “It’s a superbly crafted story of action and secrets that is as imaginative as it is compelling.” And Dirk Cussler describes it as “an adrenaline-fueled thriller of the first order.”
“I am overwhelmed,” Pote said when asked how satisfying all this early acclaim was. “There’s not much else I can say, they’re all truly kind in their praise. It’s for sure validating.”
Blood and Treasure explodes from the opening pages with the mass killing of astronauts aboard the International Space Station – followed by the discovery of a space capsule that has crashed into the Indian Ocean with what seems to be a woman who is the lone survivor of the carnage that happened 254 miles up in the sky. We soon learn that this is all connected to the desperate search for an ancient artifact that could change the world and deadly forces that will do anything to obtain it.
But this road to writing success didn’t come easy for Pote, who struggled for a long time before his idea for the book became a reality.
“It’s just an awful process. Nothing good came from joining the infamous slush piles of the literary agents at almost every major agency I could look up. I got nothing out of over 400+ rejections other than anxiety and grief.
“When I truly let go of the ambition in my heart and turned it over to God, that’s when everything changed for me. And, not a word changed within my novel either. It was the exact same book that’d been rejected so many times before.”
Pote is a twelve-year veteran Navy helicopter pilot who was part of a joint interagency special operations task force, deployed throughout Central and South America. He was medically separated after sustaining injuries during an emergency landing. He currently works for the Department of Defense.
How much of the story in Blood and Treasure was inspired by his own real life experiences in the military?
“All of it. I drew on my own experiences for everything. If not mine, then the experiences of friends. Although it’s a fantastic adventure, readers will be surprised to know there’s a lot more fact than fiction within the pages of Blood and Treasure.”
And what advice does Pote have for anyone else out there who wants to write a novel for the first time?
“Set a goal and treat it like a job. You’re going to need to give up a lot of things to really go for this. Push yourself. But in the end, you only learn by doing. So be strong and courageous and do the work!”
