Book Review — Dead in the Water by Matthew Campbell

This morning, I finished Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel. Campbell and Chellel are both award-winning business reporters for Bloomberg. The book was written in 2022.

What do you do when, upon investigating a story, you are warned several times that if you continue your line of inquiry, you are doing so at the risk of your safety? You know that at least one person involved has been murdered; others have been kidnapped or forced to flee their homes and countries of residence in terror. What will you do?

Dead in the Water is an audacious and shocking expose of the mysterious underbelly of international shipping through the prism of the hijacking of the ship, Brillante Viruoso, and the events that ensued. It took the authors four years to piece together the awful reality of one of the largest financial swindles in shipping history.

“…police records, military documents, emails, memos, and audio transcripts, as well as interviews with more than 75 people involved in the events concerned. No scenes or dialogue have been invented or embellished”

I knew about the seafarers but did not fully appreciate their importance to global trade until I saw some stats in this book. For instance, they account for…