Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933.He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University.

He became a full-time writer in 1964 after successful publication of When the Lion Feeds, and has since written twenty-six novels,all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books are now translated into twenty-six languages.

He owns a farm and game reserve and has an abiding concern for the peoples and wildlife of his native continent,an interest strongly reflected in his novels.

He is married to Danielle, to whom his last twenty-one novels have been dedicated.

About this book:

Harry Fletcher,a man with a chequered past,now makes an honest living as a charter skipper fishing in the magnificent Indian Ocean.Until suddenly men from a world he has put behind him plunge him once more into a deadly game.And he must play-for an unknown prize against undeclared odds-by the rules of violence and death which he once pratised as an art.For of one thing he is certain:to fail is to die...

The deep. The deadly. The damned... For a thousand years, an unimaginable treasure has rested on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, hidden by swift blue currents, guarded by deadly coral reefs, and even deadlier school of man-eating great white sharks. Harry Fletcher, a former soldier turned fisherman, is now being pulled into a murderous mystery by men willing to kill and a beautiful woman willing to lie for what rests far beneath the sea. Now, Harry has no choice but to enter full bore into an international battle to raise an extraordinary object from the deep. Because possessing this treasure isn't just about getting rich--it's about staying alive...