Clive Cussler's life nearly parallels that of his hero, Dirk PittŪ. Whether searching for lost aircraft or leading expeditions to find famous shipwrecks, he has garnered an amazing record of success. With his NUMA crew of volunteers, Cussler has discovered more than sixty lost ships of historic significance, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley. Like Pitt, Cussler collects classic automobiles. His collection features eighty examples of custom coachwork and is one of the finest to be found anywhere. Cussler divides his time between the deserts of Arizona and the mountains of Colorado.

The coin of the realm for the wealthy, insatiably greedy Chinese smuggler who is Dirk Pitt's adversary in Flood Tide is human lives: much of his vast fortune has been made smuggling Chinese immigrants into countries around the globe, including the United States.

Tracking the smuggler's nefarious activities leads Pitt from Washington State to Louisiana, where his quarry is mysteriously constructing a huge shipping port in the middle of nowhere. Why has he chosen this unlikely location?

The trail then leads to the race to find the site of the mysterious sinking of the ship that Chiang Kai-shek filled with treasure when he fled China in 1949, including the legendary boxes containing the bones of Peking Man that had vanished at the beginning of World War I. As Pitt prepares for a final dramatic showdown, he is faced with the most formidable foe he has ever encountered.

With a dozen consecutive New York Times bestsellers and over 70 million copies of his books in print, Clive Cussler is one of America's most popular novelists. His latest book is enthralling, intricately plotted, and supremely suspenseful.

For National Underwater & Marine Agency crew leader Kurt Austin, an investigation into the sudden deaths of rare whales leads him to the Mexican coast, where someone tries to put him and his mini-sub permanently out of commission. Meanwhile, in South America's lush hills, a specially assigned NUMA crew turns up the white-goddess legend -- and a murderous cadre of bio-pirates intent on stealing medicinal secrets worth millions. Soon Austin and his crew realize they're working the opposite ends of the same grand scheme. A billionaire California tycoon is poised to rise to power by monopolizing the earth's vastly depleted freshwater reserves and ultimately dominate the world.

Austin has a hunch Venezuela's mythical tribal goddess has some real roots in science, and may be the key to locating a secret formula that could turn vast amounts of seawater into fresh. But with each step into the bush, he and his NUMA team feel like fish out of water -- and must fight a deadly, twisting trail of enemies through a dense jungle of treachery, blackmail, and murder.