The Nautical Chart

The Nautical Chart

Product Description Coy, a suspended sailor with time on his hands, meets the beautiful Tnger Soto in Barcelona at a maritime auction and embarks on an adventure to recover the Dei Gloria , a Jesuit ship sunk in the seventeenth century by pirates. 125,000 first printing. Amazon.com Review A treasure hunt for a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates off the coast of Spain is the plot on which Perez-Revertes new novel turns, but a love story is the real heart of this nicely crafted, carefully told adventure. A suspended sailor happens on a maritime auction in Barcelona, where he meets the beautiful Tanger Soto, a museum curator whose winning bid buys her a 17th-century atlas that may reveal the final resting place of the Dei Gloria. Coy, the sailor, is totally smitten, so its no surprise that he signs on to help Tanger track the sunken ship to its grave in waters hes sailed since childhood. Enlisting the aid of a diver friend, Coy and Tanger stay a few steps ahead of the crooked salvagers whove been trying to get the atlas, outmaneuvering the attempts on their lives and the efforts to keep them from the treasure. Perez-Reverte ( The Fencing Master, The Club Dumas) is better at plumbing the mysteries of the human heart than those of the sea, but The Nautical Chart manages to combine history, suspense, and obsessive love in a slow-paced but ultimately engrossing read. --Jane Adams From Publishers Weekly Popular Spanish novelist Perez-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 pilots 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 Tanger Soto, of Madrids Museo Naval; the ponytailed man is a famed pirate of sea salvage, Nino Palermo. Coy comes to Tangers 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. Perez-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 Perez-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 School Library Journal A suspended sailor and a gorgeous woman who works at Madrids Naval Museum join forces to uncover a sunken galleon and find themselves in hot water. From the author of intellectual thrillers like The Flanders Panel. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Spanish master Perez-Reverte has a streamlined approach to novel writing: he takes a recherch? 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,