Murder on Pratas Reef

Finalist for the 2007 National Best Books Award for Historical Fiction, this book is a must-read! It is July, 1965, just before dawn in the South China Sea. The USS Frank Knox, a proud US Navy ship en route from Vietnam to Hong Kong, has just run aground on a reef. The officers and crew must work together to find a way to free the ship, but just as they thought matters could not be any worse, a body is discovered after the grounding. Much worse, it was not accidental, but a murder! The captain must contend with a career-ending, monumental mistake that could cost the US Navy one of its best destroyers. The crew, officers and sailor alike, will endure long, back-breaking hours of labor, shortages of supplies and fresh water, and dangerous attempts to free the ship from the reef. The inevitable murder investigation proceeds under its own momentum and puts every man on edge. An enormous task force of U.S. Navy ships converges on Pratas Reef, and the personalities of men aboard the stricken ship and the ships of the task force shape the events surrounding the immense salvage operation. The Knox sailors have the added humiliation of enduring constant ribbing from the sailors aboard the other ships. A young signalman, R.J. Davis, aboard the USS Prairie, has a front-row seat to most of the twists and turns of fate over the 37 days of the operation. The burgeoning Vietnam conflict, the civil rights movement, and the Watts riots in Los Angeles affect the men and their morale as they attempt a next-to-impossible feat. The extraordinary occurrence underlying this fictional murder mystery actually happened in 1965 to the USS Frank Knox, a Navy destroyer which had been named Ship of the Year in 1964. The grounding was the catalyst for a huge task force of U.S. Navy ships, which came together for 37 days of tortuous and heroic efforts to release the ship from the clutches of Pratas Reef. What could have been the U.S. Navy s most humiliating event became instead a testament to the honor, loyalty, and dedication of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in their rescue of their sister ship.