The Wrecking Crew

Pirates used to kill with cutlasses and cannons – now they use sub-machine guns and the Internet.
The result is the same – a murderous reign of terror.

Phillip Hamnet left port at the helm of the MV Shawould, apparently master of his vessel and his destiny... but others had a different agenda on that evil night in the South China Sea.

Drug warlord Janac has turned to piracy to fund his battle for control of the Australian narcotics trade, and Hamnet is faced with a fatal decision.

As Janac forces one brutal choice after another, Hamnet is drawn deep into the nightmare world of a man who thrives on psychological terror.

Mark Chisnell’s powerful tale of modern-day piracy sweeps from the teeming ports of Singapore and Bangkok, deep into the jungle valleys of the Golden Triangle and back to the lawless seas. Some debts are written in blood, and Phillip Hamnet will collect, whatever the cost...

Reviews

‘It’s a great escapist yarn with Janac a really nasty villain who gives Hamnet untold grief. I enjoyed this one.’

Hawkes Bay Today

‘I found it impossible to put down.’

Boating New Zealand

‘A real ripping yarn, hard to take seriously but begging to be made into an all-action film.’

Qantas in-flight magazine

‘Perfect for summer reading.’

CityMix Auckland

Writing The Wrecking Crew

The difficult second novel … I can’t speak for anyone else, but the biggest problem I faced was getting over the shock that there was a second novel - that the first had been published. Then there’s the conflict between what you think you want to write next – something different – and what the publisher wants – more of the same. And in between these two stools seemed to fall every single good idea I’d ever had - and meanwhile the clock was ticking, the follow-up book had to be out within eighteen months…

My first solid idea was about a scam to win a triple roll-over lottery by buying every possible number combination – but it got squished by my editor after getting bogged down in the technical details of buying the millions of tickets. The second idea came out as a Sandra Bullock movie (The Net) when I’d only got as far as the fourth chapter of a plot based on identity theft. The third started out when I noticed the parallel between Cornish wreckers lighting false beacons to lure unwary ships onto the rocks, and what could be done to Global Positioning System (GPS) devices with a transmitter sending out false Differential signals – which normally make the system more accurate.

And then it seemed obvious that if this was to be a thriller about modern-day pirates and wreckers, the evil character I’d come up with for The Defector was the perfect man to lead The Wrecking Crew. And I had an idea for another dilemma, as Janac went on to say in the book; ‘The distinction is important: saving those we know against saving those we don’t. People will go to vast effort and expense to rescue two or three men trapped on a mountain, or in a crippled yacht, when logically they could save many more lives by investing the money in a clean water supply for an African village. But those villagers rarely have names or faces, or distraught wives and mothers giving tearful interviews in a familiar language. It’s an empathy with those at risk that seems to change it for people. It seems to remove rationality from the moral equation and leave it driven by emotion.’

But I needed a worthy opponent for Janac - a ruthless moral rationalist, someone who could take those impossible choices and distil them into an equation solvable for the greater good. Then I remembered another idea that I’d stuck in the file a while back - The Lifeboat Man. Seven men in a lifeboat, days from the shipping lanes and rescue, and nowhere near enough water for them all to make it. Do you share the supplies evenly and keep your fingers crossed for a miracle, or do you ensure just a minority survive long enough – but at the clear and definite cost of the other lives?

Now I had a story, but conscious of the difficult, eight draft development of The Defector, I was anxious to do a lot more planning for this one. I hammered out a detailed synopsis and then began. In retrospect, I’m not sure that it wasn’t a little too detailed, that I’d crossed too many t’s and dotted too many i’s too early, that the final writing of the book needed a little more flexibility. But until I try a middle route – looser structure to the storyline than I had for The Wrecking Crew, but more than just the ending I had for The Defector – I can’t be sure...

Latest Book

Spanish Castle to White Night is a stunning new book about the Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 - published in October 2009.

More fiction by Mark Chisnell

Making the tough choices had never been a problem for Martin Cormac. Big city finance deals were in his blood, life was a game to be played hard and fast. But one choice too many was about to unravel his entire existence...