When a waitress from an Appalachicola oyster bar heads south to Miami, she suddenly finds herself embroiled in a zany mystery set in Florida involving a man, the mob, a boat, guns, oysters, and a mysterious coffin. A first novel. Reprint.

Desiree Dean, a runaway wealthy kid, accidentally sets a tattoo parlor ablaze, resulting in a mysterious explosion that leaves the Florida Gulf Coast fishing village of Cedar Key in an uproar.

The USA touts Chesapeake Bay as its premier environmental restoration programme, yet the Bay remains in poor condition.

Overfishing. For the world’s oceans, it’s long been a worrisome problem with few answers. Many of the global fish stocks are at a dangerous tipping point, some spiraling toward extinction. But as older fishing fleets retire and new technologies develop, a better, more sustainable way to farm this popular protein has emerged to profoundly shift the balance. The Blue Revolution tells the story of the recent transformation of commercial fishing: an encouraging change from maximizing volume through unrestrained wild hunting to maximizing value through controlled harvesting and farming. Entrepreneurs applying newer, smarter technologies are modernizing fisheries in unprecedented ways. In many parts of the world, the seafood on our plates is increasingly the product of smart decisions about ecosystems, waste, efficiency, transparency, and quality. Nicholas P. Sullivan presents this new way of thinking about fish, food, and oceans by profiling the people and policies transforming an aging industry into one that is “post-industrial”—fueled by “sea-foodies” and locavores interested in sustainable, traceable, quality seafood. Catch quotas can work when local fishers feel they have a stake in the outcome; shellfish farming requires zero inputs and restores nearshore ecosystems; new markets are developing for kelp products, as well as unloved and “underutilized” fish species. Sullivan shows how the practices of thirty years ago that perpetuated an overfishing crisis are rapidly changing. In the book’s final chapters, Sullivan discusses the global challenges to preserving healthy oceans, including conservation mechanisms, the impact of climate change, and unregulated and criminal fishing in international waters. In a fast-growing world where more people are eating more fish than ever before, The Blue Revolution brings encouraging news for conservationists and seafood lovers about the transformation of an industry historically averse to change, and it presents fresh inspiration for entrepreneurs and investors eager for new opportunities in a blue-green economy.

A gem dealer caught up in a decades-old murder mystery searches for the world’s most precious and mysterious pearls in New York Times–bestselling author Gerald A. Browne’s exotic, riveting thriller When Grady Bowman and his new girlfriend, Julia Elkins, travel from San Francisco to the Far East to get Grady back into the gem business, a jeweler in Bangkok tells them the extraordinary true story of two female Japanese pearl divers who discovered in the Andaman Sea an oyster bed filled with priceless, naturally blue pearls. The divers were murdered for what they found, and now the son of one of the divers wants revenge. As Grady and Julia hunt for the source of the priceless pearls, they are led to the estate and oyster farms of the world’s wealthiest pearl dealer. Here Julia becomes increasingly obsessed with the divers’ tragic deaths, and she and Grady will unravel an extraordinary mystery of one man’s obsession and another man’s crime, and the world’s most breathtaking naturally blue pearls.