Teddy
Roosevelt contrived a scheme to build and control it. Some say Jimmy Carter gave it away.
Then Bill Clinton shied off last December’s handover. But whatever you might like to
think, the Panama Canal is now being run by the Panamanians…
So what
would happen if Colombian narco-guerrillas, working with the half-crazy son of a drug
baroness, looked set to cause chaos in Panama and wreck its canal? Meet Lucinda Leung, a
journalist with her job on the skids and a nose for trouble, and an almost bankrupt
shipowner, who some 20 years earlier had caused her father’s death, but is now
obliged to organize the guerrilla’s transportation as a tradeoff against promised
refinancing. Then you have a little of the rich texture that makes up The Panama Affair.
Barry Evetts always hankered to write a thriller,
with touches of cynicism and his own dry humor. But it wasn’t until he found himself
in Panama, working for a Colombian owned shipping group that he had the time – and
the embryo of a chilling plot
Evetts is a
35-year veteran of the maritime industry and a qualified shipbroker with career spells in
Hong Kong, Australia, his native New Zealand and Britain, as well as Latin America. His
easy style of writing includes insights into the arcane mysteries of tramp shipping, which
are rarely found so accurately described in the pages of a novel.
The weekly
international shipping newspaper TradeWinds describes The Panama Affair
as “…a sort of ripping yarn with all the intrigue one likes to think goes on in
the shipping world. It is a spicy cocktail of unscrupulous shipowners in Hong Kong, cagey
conversations between brokers at the Baltic Exchange, and dodgy dealings of drug barons in
South America.”
The
Panama Affair can be viewed, browsed
through and ordered from www.bookviews.com/bookPage/thepanamaaffair.html
and from Amazon.com, bn.com, borders.com and booksamillion.com.
Contact Barry
Evetts
Fax: 011-58-2-9750132. E-mail bevetts@cantv.net
The Panama Affair: A Novel / ISBN 0-595-00176-9 / April 2000 / Soft Cover / 6’’x
9’’/ 504 pages / Price: US$ 23.95
August 6, 2000