Circle of Bones

Officially, Surcouf was lost in a collision off Panama. One hundred and thirty men. No wreck, in eighty-four years of looking.

At sea off Guadeloupe, 2008. Former Marine Maggie Riley steers her 40-foot sailboat towards Pointe-à-Pitre to ask a man she once loved one question.

Two years ago, in the smoke of the Lima embassy bombing, the Marine Security Guard watched him walk away — leaving her with burn scars and a friend she couldn't carry out fast enough. Call it crazy, call it closure. She wanted one hour with the Ivy League SOB.

She never gets to ask.

The Atlantic south of Bermuda, 1942. Surcouf's French crew mutinies, and Lieutenant Gerald Woolsey is thrown into the cargo hold — with a deposed captain, two Englishmen, and a thousand pounds of French National Treasury gold hidden in bottles of the captain's private champagne. What the crew doesn't know is that a bomb is ticking two decks above them, or that the sealed mailbag in the radio room holds American decrypts proving someone knew what was coming to Pearl Harbor and did nothing.

Sixty-six years later, Maggie Riley pulls a half-drowned stranger out of the Caribbean Sea wearing nothing but a gold coin on a chain. Dr. Cole Thatcher calls himself a maritime archaeologist. His colleagues call him a crackpot. Armed with his murdered father's coded journals, he tells her he is hunting the long-lost French submarine Surcouf.

What he doesn't tell her is that an Ivy League SOB is hunting him.

Riley wants no part of it. Then she puts his gold coin under a magnifier and finds three numbers etched beneath the angel's hand.

322

The same numbers her brother wrote on his hand the night he died.

Soon Riley and Cole are racing across the islands — from the green volcanoes of Guadeloupe to the rain forests of Dominica — decoding a trail left by a dead man, searching for a wrecked submarine that a circle of powerful men has spent sixty-six years making sure no one ever finds. Because Surcouf went down carrying more than gold. She carried proof of a betrayal that could rewrite American history.

A real submarine that vanished without a trace. A real secret society. And one woman who won't stop asking questions — perfect for readers of Clive Cussler, James Rollins, and Steve Berry.

Circle of Bones is Book One of the Shipwreck Adventures, an international thriller series pairing history's unsolved maritime disappearances with conspiracies that never died.