When an oil tanker is hijacked by a novice band of Somali pirates, It's a near impossible problem to solve in one of the most remote and dangerous places on earth. A team of experts are called in with one job to do, save the lives of the crew. Can this 'A-team' do so? Can they prevent a massive environmental disaster, rescue the ship and its hundred million dollar cargo? There are reputations to be made, or lost... Winner of the AudioBookReviewer.Com 'Reviewers Choice' award and 'Best New Author 2021' Indies Today 5 star recommended! Multiple professional 5 star reviews from Readers Favourite, Prairies Book Review and BookView The Ransom Drop, a true to real life, military suspense thriller, that reveals the secrets behind the resolution of Somali piracy. It's factually correct, fictionally fantastic, and written by the guy who delivered some of the largest ransoms ever paid at sea.
A New York Times Bestselling AuthorNo one gets the better of Blythe Woolrich, who manages to run Woolrich Mercantile and keep her virtue intact among Revolutionary Philadelphia's unsavory characters. But Pirate captain Raider Prescott is intent on making quick money, and ransoming a proper Philadelphia lady seems the perfect scheme - until he discovers that her family has no money. Now he's stuck at sea with the headstrong "Woolwitch," a creature as vexing as she is lovely.
Wilson Lander has a permanent sense of dread, which is exacerbated when he finds two tarot cards lying in the street. When the beautiful Cricket persuades him to travel with her to Africa, he decides to let fate take its course. What he hoped would be an Epicurean exercise turns into a nightmare.
Sharon Kay Penman follows up her acclaimed novel Lionheart with this vivid and heart-wrenching New York Times bestseller about the last event-filled years in the life of Richard I of England, Coeur de Lion. November 1192. After his bloody crusade in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Richard and his crew are overcome by a sudden storm, its fierce winds propelling the ship onto the Sicilian shore. But this misfortune is just the beginning. Forced to make a dangerous choice, Richard finds himself in enemy territory, where he is captured—in violation of the papal decree protecting all crusaders—and handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor. Imprisoned in the notorious fortress at Trifels, from which few ever leave alive, Richard, for the first time in his life, experiences pure, visceral fear—while his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, moves heaven and earth to secure his release. Amid betrayals, intrigues, infidelities, wars, and illness, Richard’s courage and intelligence will become legend.
The Scabbard of Invincibility has finally had its powers restored and it is time to return it to Sabre Island. When Al and Owen travel there, they are delighted to meet up with their friend Captain Gunner. But can Gunner be trusted? Just try to resist the action-packed Dragon Blood Pirates series - and the lure of adventure and mystery on the high seas.
Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the author of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism in this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates—a riveting,thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, religious extremism, and the costs of survival. In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International—and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting—Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits—physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror—Moore’s survival is a testament to his indomitable strength of mind. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German institutions, friends, colleagues, and his strong-willed mother. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history. Caught between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, and the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him—the economics and history of piracy; the effects of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various faces of Islam—and places his ordeal in the context of the larger political and historical issues. A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the Sea is wildly compelling and a book that will take its place next to titles like Den of Lions and Even Silence Has an End.
Winner of the inaugural Chicken House/London Times Children's Fiction Competition, which called it "a funny, clever, towering adventure."Because of climate change, much of 23rd-century England is underwater. Poor Lilly is out fishing with her trusty first mate, Cat, when greedy raiders pillage the town--and kidnap the Prime Minister's daughter. Her village blamed, Lilly decides to find the girl. Off she sails, in secret. And with a ransom: a mysterious talking jewel. Along the way she forms a wary friendship with Zeph, a punky raider boy. "If I save the Prime Minister's daughter," Lilly reasons, "he's sure to reward me." Little does Lilly know that it will take more than grit to outwit the tricky, treacherous piratical tribes!
How is it possible for six men to take a Liberian-flagged oil tanker hostage and negotiate a huge pay out for the return of its crew and 2.2 million barrels of crude oil? In his gripping new book, Jatin Dua answers this question by exploring the unprecedented upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia in the twenty-first century. Taking the reader inside pirate communities in Somalia, onboard multinational container ships, and within insurance offices in London, Dua connects modern day pirates to longer histories of trade and disputes over protection. In our increasingly technological world, maritime piracy represents not only an interruption, but an attempt to insert oneself within the world of oceanic trade. Captured at Sea moves beyond the binaries of legal and illegal to illustrate how the seas continue to be key sites of global regulation, connectivity, and commerce today.
Soon to be a major motion picture The first close-up look at the hidden world of Somali pirates by a young journalist who dared to make his way into their remote havens and spent a year infiltrating their lives. For centuries, stories of pirates have captured imaginations around the world. The recent ragtag bands of pirates off the coast of Somalia, hijacking multimillion-dollar tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates, have brought the scourge of piracy into the modern era. Jay Bahadur’s riveting narrative exposé—the first of its kind—looks at who these men are, how they live, the forces that created piracy in Somalia, how the pirates spend the ransom money, how they deal with their hostages, among much, much more. It is a revelation of a dangerous world at the epicenter of political and natural disaster.
