A True Crime Winner From Douglas Stewart

“An outstanding work on a vitally important subject”

—Dr Frank Wiswall

Vice-President, Comité Maritime International

 

It is with no surprise that we learn that Doug Stewart, recognised author of over a dozen books in the crime/thriller genre, has written yet another best-selling book on the topical and very relevant subject of pirates and crime at sea. Following on from his extraordinary success with Hard Place which was recently featured as an Amazon ‘Best Book of the Year So Far’ and a Best Book of the Month on Amazon USA, Stewart has come up trumps again with this contemporary view  on audacious fraud, murder and  terrorism on the high seas.

Terrror at Sea provides us with 289 pages of swashbuckling drama, bringing to real life all the terror involved in an attack by pirates. However, these modern-day ‘pirates’ are armed with rocket-launchers and automatic machine-guns, making their activities somewhat more disturbing than the ‘walking the plank’ of old.

Speaking of ‘walking the plank’, The Jump Buddy Gang featured in one of the assorted exposés is based on a real-life Filipino gang, so known for making crews walk the plank at gunpoint with the command ‘ambak pare’ – meaning ‘Jump Buddy’.  As Stewart’s book enters the mysterious world of the Triads and other organized crime gangs, some of the most bloody, cunning and lucrative attacks, frauds and schemes of the past twenty years are brought to the page in a startling and chilling way.

 Even as you read these lines, somewhere on the high seas mariners are being attacked by armed pirates, their faces masked, their weapons deadly. Their victims may be murdered, tortured, seized as hostages, or simply dumped overboard. Piracy, kidnapping and terrorism is a multibillion dollar business. A recent worrying trend, bringing the threat closer to home, is theft and hostage-taking to fund terrorism. International law enforcement, despite a welcome increased will to combat crime at sea, has struggled to be effective in prevention and punishment.

As Stewart told BBC correspondent and best-selling author, Humphrey Hawksley, in a recent interview, “A reviewer of one of my previous books wrote, ‘he makes us think, but still entertains us.’ I aim to strike a happy balance between escapism and reality with my writing.” With this book, Stewart achieves all that and more, dragging us kicking and screaming into what is happening all around us whether we are on cruise ships, pleasure craft or giant oil tankers. The profits are huge, the methods can be deadly.  

For more information on Douglas Stewart and his prolific output, please visit the website at http://www.douglassstewartbooks.com .