Coy is a sailor without a ship.Tanger Soto is a woman with an obsession to find the Dei Gloria, a ship sunk during the seventeenth century, and El Piloto is an old man with the sailboat on which all three set out to seek their fortune together. Or do they? Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Popular Spanish novelist Prez-Reverte (The Fencing Master; The Club Dumas) is known as "the master of the intellectual thriller." But his customarily skillful blend of pop erudition and conscious borrowing of literary precedents threatens to capsize this tale of a race to retrieve a fortune in emeralds that sank off the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1767. Manuel Coy is now in the Conrad phase of his life, having previously lived a Stevenson period and a Melville period. He is a "sailor exiled from the sea," his pilot's license suspended for two years after he ran a merchant ship onto an uncharted rock in the Indian Ocean. Attending an auction of nautical relics in Barcelona (in his "Lord Jim jacket"), Coy watches a beautiful young blonde woman outmaneuver a menacing ponytailed man to purchase a 17th-century nautical chart of the Spanish coast by Urrutia Salcedo. The woman is Tnger Soto, of Madrid's Museo Naval; the ponytailed man is a famed pirate of sea salvage, Nino Palermo. Coy comes to Tnger's defense when he sees her being threatened outside the auction house by Palermo thus putting himself in the service of a woman he is sure will eventually betray him. The characters are only too aware of the affinities of their story with The Maltese Falcon, and with a whole library of sea literature. Prez-Reverte is too accomplished a novelist to write a truly dull book, and the underwater sequences that climax the story are masterfully done. But any sea adventure that is more than half over before it makes it to the sea has to be in some kind of trouble. (Oct.)Forecast: This may not be Prez-Reverte at his best, but his second-best will be more than good enough for most readers. A first printing of 125,000 copies and a five-city author tour are in the works.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Spanish master Perez-Reverte has a streamlined approach to novel writing: he takes a recherche subject say, fencing or rare books and uses it to construct a story rich in suspense, detail, and character study. The territory he covers in his latest work (after The Fencing Master) is in fact the deep blue sea. Coy, a sailor suspended for two years from the Merchant Marine, becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman named Tnger Soto he encounters at an auction. There she has successfully bid on an old maritime atlas that will guide her to the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship downed in the Mediterranean in the 18th century. Soon Tnger has drawn Coy into her scheme, which pits them against a thug named Palermo and his sidekick dwarf. All the elements are here for another literate thriller from Perez-Reverte, but this work is surprisingly less effective than its predecessors. The set-up is intriguing and the ending persuasively suspenseful, but in the middle stretches a long, becalmed section that dwells tediously on maritime detail and on Coy's endless seesawing as he considers whether to trust the obviously treacherous Tnger. Perhaps those with a taste for the sea will be more drawn in; otherwise, this should work primarily for larger thriller collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Internationally acclaimed author Arturo Perez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Spain, where he lives. His bestselling books have been translated into nineteen languages in thirty countries Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

I Lot 307	3
II The Trafalgar Showcase	33
III The Lost Ship	56
IV Latitude and Longitude	84
V Zero Meridian	119
VI Of Knights and Knaves	150
VII Ahab's Doubloon	179
VIII The Reckoning Point	204
IX Forecastle Women	236
X The Coast of the Corsairs	264
XI The Sargasso Sea	293
XII Southwest Quarter to South	326
XIII The Master Cartographer	358
XIV The Mystery of the Green Lobsters	389
XV The Devil's Irises	415
XVI The Graveyard of Ships With No Name	438

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