Pirate Trade

Perhaps 90% of what I know of ivory and its products I learned recently through reading Rick Boyer's PIRATE TRADE. That is the eighth of nine DOC ADAMS detective mystery novels. ***** Oral surgeon and weekend sailor Doc Adams has just bought wife Mary a modern day copy of Nineteenth Century Nantucket lightship baskets (now ladies' purses). Its cover has a beautiful piece of carved ivory on it. When Doc gives the purse to Mary, she fears that the ivory is illegal, pirated. She is into ecology these days and an active member of Cape Watch, run by friends of the Adams family -- fishing tour guides whose livelihood is seriously threatened around Cape Cod by depletion of various species of salt water fish. Might they have been tempted into smuggling? *****A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officer persuades Mary to join another investigator (old friend of Doc, much too handsome for Doc's taste) going underground with Cape Cod merchants trying to find suspected ivory smugglers. ***** In the novel we learn about the three species of ivory and the creatures that deliver them: African elephants, walruses and narwhals. East African elephant ivory is remarkably pliant. Nineteenth Century English gentlemen used riding crops made of such ivory. But their major commerical use was for billiard balls. With luck one elephant's tusk can (or used to, before prohibited) yield five billiard balls. Today there is big money to be made in smuggling it into the USA. And Mary and Doc had better tread lightly when up against the smugglers. *****PIRATE TRADE is indeed didactic -- it wouldn't be a Rick Boyer novel if it weren't. But there is ample mystery, intrigue, derring-do and murder to satisfy any reader of Rick Boyer. This Edgar Award winner know how to spin a yarn and draw us into its web. -OOO-