White Cargo

Cat Catledge is a happy man. A self-made millionaire at 50, he has a loving wife and a beautiful teenage daughter. And after years of hard work, he is taking his family on the ultimate dream sabbatical: a two-year cruise to the South Pacific via the Panama Canal aboard his custom-built forty-three-foot yacht.

He gets as far as Colombia.

Off its cocaine-dusted shores Catledges bliss — and his dearly beloved family — are permanently shattered by an event so unexpected, so savage, and so tragically final that it leaves Cat completely devastated. Consumed by terrible guilt, he returns home alone, a broken man. Investigations by both the Colombian authorities and the U.S. State Department prove fruitless.

Then, late one night, Cat is awakened by the telephone and from far away, over a static-filled line, an achingly familiar voice utters a single, electrifying word.

Driven by a mixture of hope and anguish, Cat slips back into South America on a desperate search for the daughter he cannot bring himself to believe is dead — a search that will take him down the corridors of cocaine-financed palaces, through the fetid alleys of the barrios, and into the impenetrable Amazonian jungle itself. Aided by an Australian ex-convict, a beautiful television journalist, and a man known to him only as “Jim,” Cat follows a trail of blood and graft, white powder and white slavery, and discovers in himself an unsuspected capacity for cunning and ruthlessness, and — even more surprising — a rekindled capacity for love.

From the glittering beaches of the Caribbean to the final harrowing showdown in the Amazonian rain forest, Stuart Woods surprises us again and again with this breakneck tale of danger, intrigue, and depravity. With a gift for description that will remind many readers of Graham Greene’s brilliant Latin American novel of suspense, The Power and the Glory, and with a plot that rivals such masters of suspenseful narrative as Richard Condon, Stuart Woods in White Cargo continues his rise through the ranks of the world’s pre-eminent storytellers.