Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature's Bounty, by Craig Welch

A delightfully offbeat and utterly true cops-and-robbers tale, set in the rough-and-tumble heart of one of America's strangest subcultures — a double-crossing world where tough men and women fight turf wars over shellfish.

Craig Welch drops readers overboard into the frigid waters of Puget Sound, home to the magnificent geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"). The world's largest burrowing clam, the bizarre-looking geoduck can live a century and a half. Comically proportioned but increasingly fashionable as seafood, the geoduck has been the subject of pranks, TV specials, gourmet feasts, and a legal commercial fishing industry. It also trades for millions of dollars on the black market—a world where outlaw scuba divers dodge cops while using souped-up boats, night-vision goggles, and weighted belts to pluck the succulent treasures from the sea floor. The thieves work alongside whales, sharks and half-ton sea lions, but the greatest dangers come from rival poachers who resort to arson and hit men to eliminate competition and stake their claim in the illicit geoduck market.

Wildlife detective Ed Volz has spent his life chasing elk-antler thieves, bobcat smugglers, and eagle talon poachers. Now he is determined to find the kingpin of the geoduck underworld. He and a team of state and federal agents spend years working their way up through a rogues' gallery of lawbreakers, to come face to face with the biggest thief of all—a darkly charming con man who calls himself the "Geoduck Gotti," a fisherman who worked both sides of the law.

In Shell Games, veteran environmental journalist Welch delves into the wilds of our nation's waters and forests in search of some of America's strangest criminals. This thrilling examination of the international black market for wildlife is filled with butterfly thieves, abalone poachers, undercover operatives, bear slayers, and shark-trafficking pastors—all part of one of the largest illegal trades in the world.

Shell Games is a unique blend of natural history and crime caper—a real-life drama about the theft of some of the world's most unusual creatures, set in one of the planet's most beautiful places.

Praise

"With the sizzle of a mystery novelist, Welch portrays a complex, driven, and irresistible cast of real-life characters.... Welch's utterly compelling true tale of black—market trade in endangered ocean wildlife is astounding and infuriating." — Booklist

"Endlessly fascinating ... Welch is a superb reporter ... the material is so rich." — The Seattle Times

"In this compelling debut, award-winning journalist Welch offers an insider's view of the illegal international trade in protected wildlife ... a fascinating tale." — Library Journal, starred review

"[An] eye-opener, exposing a murky world operating just below the surface." — Oregonian

"[A] tale of tough-guy law enforcement, with a plotline somewhere between "Kojak" and "CSI." ... the oddly riveting story of black marketeers ... and of the law-enforcement officials who go to extraordinary lengths to thwart them" — The Wall Street Journal

"With hit men, snitches, and midnight smuggling runs, this book has all the adventure of a Miami Vice episode... it reads like a detective novel—with the quarry being millions of dollars of freakishly large clams." — Mark Obmascik, author of The Big Year

"Forget CSI—this is the real deal, tracking down the greediest kinds of criminals as they plunder the planet's future. You may think that clams are nothing special, but before this book is many pages old you'll be rooting for the bivalves!" — Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

"The wildest story of bivalve intrigue and skullduggery ever assembled between two covers." — Richard Ellis, author of Tuna: A Love Story and The Empty Ocean

"I couldn't put this book down... Shell Games is rich with art, landscape, treachery, and mystery." — Susan Herrmann Loomis, author of The Great American Seafood Cookbook

"Required reading ... full of characters Raymond Chandler would have conjured ... the cops-and-robbers nature of the story makes you want to read the whole book in one gulp." — Outside magazine

"Shell Games is a fiercely reported and wholly captivating cops-and-robbers story about the black-market wildlife trade in the Pacific Northwest. But it reverberates much further than that, with profound implications for wildlife—under unprecedented threat from poachers and smugglers using high-tech means to hunt and transport their sad bounty—around the globe. By nimbly documenting a slice of the trade, Welch explores just how pervasive and woefully intricate the problem is. This is front-line reporting from the war against nature." — Jonathan Miles, author of Dear American Airlines

About the Author

Craig Welch is the chief environmental writer for the Seattle Times. His work has been published in Smithsonian magazine, the Washington Post and Newsweek. He has won dozens of local, regional and national journalism awards, and has been named the national Society of Environmental Journalists's Outstanding Beat Reporter of the Year. In 2007, he completed a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Buy a SIGNED copy of Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature's Bounty - $25.99