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Monday, November 8, 2010

Pirate Latitudes

My husband picked up Michael Crichton's unfinished novel Pirate Latitudes (#10) at the library, so I decided to read it, too.  I really enjoyed Crichton's time-travel book Timeline.  (Hated the movie version of it, though!)  Pirate Latitudes concerns Charles Hunter, a Massachusetts Colony born English privateer, who is determined to go on a raid to capture a Spanish treasure ship stranded at the Spanish island outpost of Matanceros after the fleet sails.  The Royal Governor learns of the ship from his newly arrived and morally outraged secretary who has seen the ship in the Matanceros harbor.  Since the Governor's object is to make money for the crown and for himself, he summons Hunter to grant him letters of marque as a privateer to raid Matanceros in the guise of logcutting.  Once Hunter assembles his motley crew, they set sail for the invincible fortress to steal the treasure ship.  Nothing comes easily on this voyage to Hunter and his crew as they overcome one deadly obstacle after another in pursuit of untold riches.  Piracy is a risky, violent business and the action never stops. 

I have the feeling that this manuscript outline is what Crichton wrote first - the action sequences strung together with the main characters in place, but not enough of a backstory on any of them to really make the plot hang together satisfactorily.  It kept me turning the pages to see what would happen next, but failed to make Charles Hunter a real person or to explain what motivated him, his crew or even his enemies.  (Well, except for Hacklett - Hunter did get his wife pregnant!)  If Michael Crichton had had more time to develop this aspect of his novel, it might have been a spectacular book.  But that's exactly the part that cinematographers would have excised right out of the movie version, so maybe this is enough for some people.  I'm not sorry I read it; I think it did a good job of entertaining me this weekend.

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