When Lieutenant Gavin Kelly's recon platoon swims ashore a Mogadishu beach under the glare of hundreds of news camera lights, it is an appropriately surreal beginning to Operation Restore Hope. This modern war is vastly different from the battles Kelly's father and grandfather fought and from the young lieutenant's own experience during Operation Desert Storm. Minutes after the Marines' celebrated landing, one of Kelly's men kills an armed Somali bodyguard. The circumstances of the killing are unclear and Kelly finds himself in the center of a maelstrom. He must act quickly to deflect a vociferous outcry from members of the international press corps, censure by his Marine superiors, and the possibility of losing the loyalty of his men -- particularly two enlisted leaders in the platoon who have vouched for the necessity of the kill. Thus begins Sharkman Six, a stinging morality tale in which Kelly is torn between his men, his confusing mission, and the international rules of engagement he has sworn to uphold. As his platoon descends into the lawless, violent underbelly of Somalia, Lieutenant Kelly must determine his own values -- and allegiances -- in a country where murders are commonplace and constant. With heart-pounding, intricate military detail, rapier wit, and stunning verisimilitude, Sharkman Six speaks to the violent urges lurking in us all and the lengths to which we will go to control them. In Gavin Kelly, West has created an authentic, sympathetic, and wholly compromised young officer of war who will put you in mind of the best of military heroes and antiheroes.

Documents the achievements of a team of reservists and National Guardsmen who built an Iraqi battalion and fought side by side with the first Iraqi soldiers granted independent battle space.

The adventures of a shark scientist and his mission to change our perception of New Zealand’s most feared and misunderstood predator. Riley Elliott is a surfer, spear-fisherman and shark scientist from the Waikato, currently writing a PhD at Auckland University. He’s also on a mission to share his fascination with sharks, raise the profile of their dwindling numbers and question the legitimacy of shark-finning in our waters. Riley’s passion for sharks started while he was working at the Oceans Research Great White Shark Station in South Africa, where he learned to free-dive with sharks beyond the cage. Upon his return to New Zealand, Riley began research for his PhD, and in the process uncovered some alarming trends. Riley Elliott is making it his mission to educate New Zealanders about the over-exploitation of sharks in our waters, particularly the controversial practice of shark-finning, and how it affects the ocean ecosystem. In the process he’s becoming New Zealand’s most popular expert on shark species, and a go-to commentator about our increasing encounters with this deadly ocean predator. Shark Man is Riley’s story, from his time learning to scuba dive and spearfish,his early fascination with sharks while surfing life at Raglan, his first encounters with great whites in South Africa and learning to safely free-dive to his study of New Zealand sharks species and the making of the TVNZ television documentary series ‘Shark Man’. The book also has information about New Zealand’s prevalent shark species – where they live, how they hunt, and their interaction with humans, with fascinating new insights and little-known facts.

With style and nonstop action, Owen West, winner of the Boyd literary award for best military novel of 2001, returns with Four Days to Veracruz -- an adventure-thriller that sizzles with international intrigue, relentless suspense, and straight-from-the-headlines consequences. Darren Phillips is a presidential aide, a Harvard graduate, a decorated Desert Storm veteran, and now a husband. Kate North, his new wife, is a world-class adventure racer whom he met on an Eco-Challenge endurance team. When an out-of-bounds kayaking excursion on the couple's honeymoon in Mexico lands them on the private beach of a violent drug dealer, their exotic getaway suddenly turns deadly. And Darren and Kate are, staggeringly, fugitives. They escape to the local police station -- only to enter into a bullet-ridden confrontation with the dealer's federale brother. Broadcasting the carnage and devastation left in the couples' wake, the Mexican government declares them sex-crazed drug couriers and assassins, and the State Department, to avoid an international incident, tags them as murder suspects. But even as they flee, Darren manages to pass a message to his former roommate, teammate, and disgraced Marine corpsman, Gavin Kelly (hero of Sharkman Six, West's critically acclaimed first novel). The couple's only hope for survival hinges on Kelly's ability to interpret their message and to rendezvous with them in Veracruz. The couple flees desperately on foot across the badlands of the Sierra Madre, unwittingly carrying a piece of the drug cartel's encrypted communication code with them. As they race toward Veracruz, they are pursued by corrupt Mexican police, federales, and bloodhounds. More terrifying, they are pursued by a man known as El Monstruo Carnicero -- "The Monster Butcher" -- a serial killer dispatched from the bloody desert of Juarez by the leader of the Mexican drug cartel. In all their military training, in all their endurance challenges, Darren and Kate have never before been tested as they are now, running for their lives across the wild belly of Mexico.

The true story of seventeen months in the life of a Vietnamese village where a handful of American Marines and Vietnamese militia lived and died together attempting to defend it. In Black Hawk Down, the fight went on for a day. In We Were Soldiers Once & Young, the fighting lasted three days. In The Village, one Marine squad fought for 495 days—half of them died. Few American battles have been so extended, savage and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such “Combined Action Platoons” (CAPs) are now a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to bear witness. This is the story of fifteen resolute young Americans matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought and died. And why the villagers remember them to this day.

Kwan Wilson was a high school basketball star living in San Diego when a tragic accident changed his life in ways no one could predict. He only looked at his phone for a few seconds, but that was all the time it took to crash his car into a telephone pole, the impact killing his mother while severing his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the waist down. After the accident his father, Admiral Douglas Wilson, sends him away to live with his maternal grandmother in South Florida. Kwan’s new principal, anticipating his depression and isolation, tells him about an internship working at a genetics lab in Miami that’s testing shark stem cells on rats in an effort to cure cancer and repair spinal injuries. Kwan declines—until he learns the beautiful Anya Patel is an intern at the lab. The good news is that the stem cells are curing their rat subjects; the bad news is it alters their DNA so much it kills them. When a promising breakthrough is made, Kwan risks his life and injects himself with the experimental stem cells—altering his destiny and the lives of millions in the process.

Baer gathers a multi-hued range of voices that convey, with vivid immediacy and heightened imagination, the shock and loss suffered in September 2001.