Pirate Latitudes from Michael Crichton, One-Word Description: "Unfinis..."
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
Author: Michael Crichton Title: Pirate Latitudes Genre: historical
According to the blurb on the inside back cover, Michael Crichton's posthumously-published Pirate Latitudes was "discovered as a complete manuscript in his files after his death in 2008." Given that Crichton, who decades ago cut his teeth on fine adventure novels like The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, had been catapulted to the status of "sure thing" with the success of 1990's Jurassic Park, one can only imagine the exultation of his publisher (HarperCollins), not to mention his estate. Rumor has it, in fact, that there's another unpublished MS in the mill; a "technothriller." Oh, joy. There's certainly not much "techno-" to Pirate Latitudes, though there's plenty of "thriller" - if you like that kind of thing...
The year is 1665; the setting, Jamaica. A tiny English outpost cowering on the doorstep of the Spanish Main (not to mention - literally not mentioned - the Portuguese...), Jamaica is governed for H. R. H. Charles II by Sir James Almont. When not distracted by Jamaica's wretched climate or by his gout, the Gov schemes endlessly to fatten the King's coffers (and, of course, his own). His chief source of income is his cut from the booty collected by the yo-ho-hos preying on the Spanish treasure ships, ships carrying gold and jewels looted from the Americas back to Europe. No, they're not pirates, they're privateers: they have England's official sanction for their raids.
The most successful privateer in Almont's stable is Massachusetts-born Charles Hunter: gentleman, Harvard graduate, captain of the sloop Cassandra,and lady-killer of the first water. When passengers on a newly-arrived English ship describe a "fearsome Spanish galleon" that failed to attack them, Almont realizes that the landlubbers actually saw a stranded treasure ship. Within hours, Hunter is assembling a crew to attack the ship; the fact that it is in the well-nigh impregnable harbor of Matanceros notwithstanding. Ever since Cazalla, then brutish commander of the Spanish fort at Matanceros, murdered his brother; Hunter's been plotting his demise...
So Captain Hunter assembles a motley crew of pirates... errr, privateers: a dapper French executioner, a giant mute, a mad scientist, a woman-in-reverse-drag, and the rest. And they set out aboard Cassandra to take Cazalla, his fort at Matanceros, and the ship it protects. Before departure, though, Hunter finds time to take the pleasure of the wife of Sir James's newly-arrived secretary (I said he was a lady-killer) - who knows how long it will be before he has a chance to slake his carnal thirst again? Once at sea, Hunter and his merry men (and one woman) will buckle many a swash and shiver many a timber, and the seas will run red with blood: 1665 turned out to be a very good year to be a shark in the Caribbean.
As in just about anything he ever wrote, Michael Crichton liberally sprinkles Pirate Latitudes with factoids about the period and the technology - readers will absorb plenty about life on aboard ship for the pirate crew, as well as the art of war circa the mid 1660s. He did the same with modern aircraft in Airframe and with the crude beginnings of cloning and DNA sequencing for Jurassic Park. You'll get no argument from this quarter, Crichton has always been pretty good at simplifying science for the masses.
Of course, his purpose in Pirate Latitudes is to entertain readers - not to give them an education in seventeenth-century seafaring and weaponry. To that end, Crichton's manuscript is a swashbuckler chucky-jam full of stereotypical characters and predictable action. Sure, Chrichton threw in a few twists - mostly casting Hunter in the role of tactical savant - but the book can best be described as "by-the-numbers"; where the numbers call for non-stop action and violence, with the occasional gratuitous sex scene thrown in to "keep things interesting."
Despite the cover blurb's claim that the manuscript was "finished," it's painfully clear that Pirate Latitudes was anything but. For instance, several characters are so poorly developed that their participation in the story's denouement fails to make sense. The plot reads more like a pastiche of treatments for a one-hour television drama about pirates; action scenes loosely strung together by a slender narrative. There's just not much to this book; a slim 300-page volume. Had Crichton actually finished it and worked with the HarperCollins editorial staff, I suspect this would have been an above average novel; in its published form it doesn't even reach average. Skip this one.