On our planet, there are few areas left that haven’t been explored. But perhaps the wildest and least studied are the oceans of the world. They’re too vast to control, and the huge neutral-water zones without clear international legal status have become a refuge for unbridled crime.
Slave traders and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, kidnappers of sunken ships and buyers of confiscated goods, vigilant defenders of nature and elusive poachers—bound in chains and abandoned to their fate, and illegal passengers left to their own devices. With the inhabitants of this closed world, Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Urbina introduces us—his dangerous and fearless journalistic investigations, often hundreds of miles from shore, became the basis for his book. Through stories of surprising courage and brutality, survival and tragedies, the author shows the global network of crime and violence that entangles the industries most important to the world economy: fishing, oil extraction, and shipping.