The Nautical Chart
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A fearless Spanish crew embarks on a search for a lost ship, swallowed by the Indian Ocean centuries ago, in a novel by "a master of the literary thriller" (Booklist, starred review).
Manuel Coy is a suspended sailor with time on his hands, a mariner without a ship. While attending a maritime auction in Barcelona, he meets Tánger Soto, a captivating beauty who works for the Naval Museum in Madrid. A woman obsessed with the Dei Gloria, a famed Jesuit ship sunk by pirates in the seventeenth century, she now hopes to find it and unearth its mysteries, rumored to be buried the bottom of the sea off the southern coast of Spain.
Quickly drawn into the search, Coy accompanies Tánger Soto, and a wise old man of the sea whose sailboat will carry the crew into the middle of nowhere in search of a fortune. But more than treasure is rising to the surface—secrets are, too. And from these depths will also come danger, and an adventure no one is prepared for.
From the acclaimed author of The Queen of the South, The Nautical Chart is "a swashbuckling tale of mystery" (The Washington Post Book World).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Popular Spanish novelist P rez-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 T nger Soto, of Madrid's Museo Naval; the ponytailed man is a famed pirate of sea salvage, Nino Palermo. Coy comes to T nger'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. P rez-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.
