Crude Carrier

By Rex Burns

When a sailor dies under unusual circumstances, Raiford goes undercover on the high seas.

The Rossi family received only a handful of letters after their son shipped out on the supertanker Aurora Victorious. The first dispatches were from Harold himself, describing the blend of tedium and excitement that defined life onboard the ship. The last communication came from the ship's owners: four brief sentences informing them that their son had died and been buried at sea. Desperate to know more, the Rossis turn to James and Julie Raiford, the father-daughter detective team behind the Touchstone Agency. As the Raifords soon learn, work on the open sea is dangerous – and asking questions can be deadly.

When the shipping company stonewalls the investigation, James joins the Aurora Victorious as an electronics officer, and Julie digs into the proprietors' shadowy background. International oil shipping is a ruthless business, and its secrets run as deep as the ocean itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784089733

Rex Burns

Rex Burns (b. 1935) is the author of numerous thrillers set in and around Denver, Colorado. Born in California, he served in the Marine Corps and attended Stanford University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a writer. His Edgar Award–winning first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), introduced Gabe Wager, a Denver police detective working in an organized crime unit. Burns continued this hard-boiled series through ten more novels, concluding it with 1997’s The Leaning Land. One of the Wager mysteries, The Avenging Angel (1983), was adapted as a feature film, Messenger of Death, starring Charles Bronson. Burns’s other two series center on Devlin Kirk and James Raiford, both Denver-based private detectives. Once a monthly mystery review columnist in the Rocky Mountain News, Burns has also written nonfiction and hosted the Mystery Channel’s Anatomy of a Mystery. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado.