Charlie Noble, former-Coast-Guard-officer-turned-marine-PI, is back. This time, he is hot on the trail of a human trafficking scheme that begins in Mexico…and ends in murder. Still reeling from the untimely death of his wife, Charlie begins to warm to the idea of a second chance at true love with new girlfriend Kate Sullivan. These plans are quickly docked when boating friends Marvin and Angela Baynes come to him with a horrifying discovery—the body of an unidentified young woman impaled on the flukes of their boat anchor. The Bayneses themselves lost a child years ago. No stranger to loss, Charlie finds it impossible not to help them—even though it could mean putting his new romance in jeopardy. Charlie enlists a friend, Raven, a Native-American salvage diver. Together, the pair plunge beneath the waters of Puget Sound to seek out any clues about the identity of the dead woman and how she wound up there. But they find more bodies instead—all young, all female, all Hispanic. Soon Charlie finds himself navigating a course that leads him through the choppy waters of transporting human cargo, and right into the seedy underworld of the Northwest’s sex trade. With its fresh, nautical flavor, riveting mystery, and incredible depth of humanity, Precious Cargo is a winner from Clyde Ford that is truly unique—and compulsively readable. While reading Precious Cargo , you can go online to the book’s website, www.clydeford.com/onscene.aspx , click on any place name from the book and fly there with Google Earth. Once there, you can have any number of multimedia, interactive experiences: listen to the author read from the book, watch a video interview featuring Clyde, learn more about the locations, and even see live webcam footage. A yacht weighs anchor near Bellingham, Washington, and the body of a young Latina woman is found hanging on the anchor fluke. The discovery plunges African American private investigator Charlie Noble and his taciturn former Navy SEAL buddy, Native American Raven, into a case involving human trafficking and forced prostitution. Precious Cargo is an exciting, engaging, and earnest novel about a kind of nautical knight errant who metes out justice not from horseback but from the deck of a classic old trawler that also serves as his home. The plot ambles a bit at the beginning as Ford shapes characters and locale, but it quickly builds to gale force for the resolution. The environs of the San Juan Islands, the sea passages that separate them, and the Olympic Mountains, as well as the details of live-aboard life, are lovingly and knowingly rendered, and good maps allow readers who haven’t sailed the San Juans to follow Charlie’s course. Future books in the series will follow Charlie north, up the Inside Passage toward Alaska. Plan on being on board. --Thomas Gaughan Clyde W. Ford is a mythologist, trained psychotherapist, and sought-after public speaker. He’s also a critically acclaimed author of nonfiction and fiction. He writes the Charlie Noble Mysteries, suspense thrillers set in the Pacific Northwest. He’s been a guest on the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” NPR, and other radio and television programs around the country. Clyde lives in Bellingham, Washington. He writes aboard his 30-foot Willard trawler, and cruises the waters of the Inside Passage. Fiction Mystery