From Barnes & Noble
Deprived of a ship, a mariner's mind turns naturally to women, so perhaps it's not surprising that sailor Coy deals with a suspension by becoming ensnared with a gorgeous fortune hunter who works at the Naval Museum in Madrid. Her scheme to retrieve a 17th-century sunken treasure lures Coy into very deep waters indeed. But Perez-Reverte teaches us that in reading, enthrallment is its own reward.
John Balzar
The Nautical Chart is a sea story told as a sailor might, off duty on the deck of his ship. With appreciation for character and detail. With keen command of pacing and no need to rush. Like any good storyteller, writer or musician, Perez-Reverte makes eye contact to be certain that he's got hold of you.
— Los Angeles Times
Publishers Weekly
Popular Spanish novelist Perez-Reverte (The Fencing Master; The Club Dumas) is known as "the master of the intellectual thriller." But his customarily skillful blend of pop erudition and conscious borrowing of literary precedents threatens to capsize this tale of a race to retrieve a fortune in emeralds that sank off the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1767. Manuel Coy is now in the Conrad phase of his life, having previously lived a Stevenson period and a Melville period. He is a "sailor exiled from the sea," his pilot's license suspended for two years after he ran a merchant ship onto an uncharted rock in the Indian Ocean. Attending an auction of nautical relics in Barcelona (in his "Lord Jim jacket"), Coy watches a beautiful young blonde woman outmaneuver a menacing ponytailed man to purchase a 17th-century nautical chart of the Spanish coast by Urrutia Salcedo. The woman is T nger Soto, of Madrid's Museo Naval; the ponytailed man is a famed pirate of sea salvage, Nino Palermo. Coy comes to T nger's defense when he sees her being threatened outside the auction house by Palermo thus putting himself in the service of a woman he is sure will eventually betray him. The characters are only too aware of the affinities of their story with The Maltese Falcon, and with a whole library of sea literature. P?rez-Reverte is too accomplished a novelist to write a truly dull book, and the underwater sequences that climax the story are masterfully done. But any sea adventure that is more than half over before it makes it to the sea has to be in some kind of trouble. (Oct.) Forecast: This may not be P?rez-Reverte at his best, but his second-best will be more than good enough for most readers. A firstprinting of 125,000 copies and a five-city author tour are in the works. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Spanish master Perez-Reverte has a streamlined approach to novel writing: he takes a recherch subject say, fencing or rare books and uses it to construct a story rich in suspense, detail, and character study. The territory he covers in his latest work (after The Fencing Master) is in fact the deep blue sea. Coy, a sailor suspended for two years from the Merchant Marine, becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman named T nger Soto he encounters at an auction. There she has successfully bid on an old maritime atlas that will guide her to the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship downed in the Mediterranean in the 18th century. Soon T nger has drawn Coy into her scheme, which pits them against a thug named Palermo and his sidekick dwarf. All the elements are here for another literate thriller from Perez-Reverte, but this work is surprisingly less effective than its predecessors. The set-up is intriguing and the ending persuasively suspenseful, but in the middle stretches a long, becalmed section that dwells tediously on maritime detail and on Coy's endless seesawing as he considers whether to trust the obviously treacherous T nger. Perhaps those with a taste for the sea will be more drawn in; otherwise, this should work primarily for larger thriller collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
This marvelous thriller-a seafaring mystery that pointedly evokes the immortal romances of Melville, Stevenson, and Conrad-is the fifth (and best) fiction in English translation yet from the very popular Spanish author of The Club Dumas (1997) and The Seville Communion (1998). Its plot is skillfully and quickly set in motion when Merchant Marine officer Manuel Coy a thoughtful, bookish (though "not intellectual") loner who is confined to land following a shipwreck that had occurred during his watch, attends an auction of "naval objects" in Barcelona. Coy observes a tense bidding war over a seemingly obscure 18th-century atlas, and later follows its winner, a beautiful blond woman named Tanger Soto, to the Madrid museum where she works as a researcher. He's eventually enlisted in her search for the wreck of the Dei Gloria, a brigantine owned by Jesuit brethren (and carrying an undisclosed precious cargo) that had been sunk in 1767, probably by a pursuing pirate ship, off the southern coast of Spain. Perez-Reverte paces his tale expertly, shifting its focus among the dangers that threaten Tanger's undertaking (including a sinister "treasure hunter" and his "menacing dwarf" hireling, a former Argentinean death-squad mercenary), Coy's helpless fixation on the mystery woman who simultaneously reels him in and keeps him at bay, and an impressive wealth of nautical and navigational technique and lore. The story takes a dazzling turn 100 pages from its end, when its omniscient narrator "introduces" himself (along with other, even more crucial revelations), and ends up smashingly, with a "tragicomedy of betrayals" that underscore the embittered Coy's resemblance to the resigned, burnt-outcharacters of (his favorite author) Joseph Conrad: "weary heroes, . . . aware of the danger of dreaming when at the helm." In a virtually perfect fusion of absorbing action and precise, intricate characterization, Perez-Reverte magically sustains the tension and suspense over a span of almost 500 pages. A classic of its genre, equal to the best of Eric Ambler and Patrick O'Brian-and, beyond genre, not far below the levels and depths plumbed by Melville and Conrad themselves. First printing of 125,000; author tour
