Review of Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel

Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel
By Kirk Russell
Chronicle Books; 2003; 347 pages; $12.95 (paperback)


[A truncated version of this review appears in the June 2008 issue of Between the Tides, the quarterly newsletter of Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. http://www.fitzgeraldreserve.org/]


I grew up on the east coast, spending most of my elementary school years in Connecticut. Every summer my parents took me to the coast of Maine for a week or two, and I fell resoundingly in love with the Atlantic Ocean and its inhabitants – especially marine mammals – as a result of those trips. After my parents divorced I spent a landlocked adolescence in Wisconsin. When I was twenty-one I lit out for the West Coast in the old Chevy Malibu I inherited from my mother before the ink was dry on my Beloit College degree.


I had completed my degree in 3.5 years, motivated by a strong dislike of being trapped in classrooms and hog-tied with institutional red tape, so it was late January when I first saw the Pacific Ocean. I no longer remember the route I used to cut across the state, but I was somewhere in southern California, twisting along on Highway One on cliffs high above the water, when I noticed a cluster of large boats very close to shore.



It was a spectacularly clear and sunny day, the kind implanted in my brain by hours of listening to the Beach Boys’ golden oldie “California Dreamin’” while I studied in snow-blanketed libraries and dorm rooms. Watching the almost motionless boats while I wondered what they were doing in a spot that was so obviously not an anchorage, I suddenly saw one, then three, then half-a-dozen puffs of spray.


Whales! I swerved into the nearest pullout, yanked my binoculars out of my backpack, and reveled in the sight, wishing my mother, who had been even more of a marine mammal enthusiast than I, was still alive to enjoy the scene with me. I learned from a roadside interpretive sign somewhere along the way that these were gray whales, and that they followed the coast of California on their migration north and south between Alaskan feeding waters and breeding lagoons in Baja, Mexico. It took me many hours, with many roadside stops along the way, to inch my way up the coast.


I arrived in Mendocino, California, late the next day, and by the time I had been ensconced in my Aunt Jane’s spare bedroom for a couple of weeks, some gray whales had worked their way that far north. I saw them daily on my walks on the trails of Mendocino Headlands State Park, and the three week California visit I had planned turned into a permanent relocation when I went to work at the historic Ford House Visitor and Interpretive Center. (http://www.mcn.org/1/mendoparks/mndhdld.htm)


For a year I worked there, exploring the myriad other state parks, wandering daily through Highlight Gallery and the Gallery Bookshop, and haunting the bakery and The (now-defunct) Chocolate Moose. (http://www.mendocino.org/html/shop.html)


After I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as a technical writer, Aunt Jane relocated to Fort Bragg, the mill town twenty minutes north of Mendocino, and my visits included exploring the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, going to Glass Beach, walking the Ecological Staircase at Jug Handle State Reserve, and camping in Russian Gulch and McKerricher state parks. (http://www.fortbragg.com/fort-bragg-attractions.php)


In between visits to Aunt Jane I came to know and love other spots on the Northern California coast, including Sausalito, Bodega Bay, and Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.


So imagine my delight when I discovered Kirk Russell’s Shell Games, a well-told mystery with numerous plot twists and turns, which begins with the discovery of a pile of hundreds of empty abalone shells and two abalone divers tortured to death in a fictional state park south of Fort Bragg. “They started up the creek trail, skirting waist-high greasewood and taller poison oak with dead leaves curled and drying. He smelled creek mud and the dry oaks…” Russell’s description of the scene transported me back to my old stomping grounds.


Protagonist John Marquez is a California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) warden, one of the unsung heroes in society’s struggle to save what’s left of our natural resources. Working undercover, he and his team of DFG agents are hot on the trail of large-scale abalone poachers who are threatening the survival of the species.


In the torture deaths of the two abalone divers, Marquez believes he recognizes the handiwork of a criminal mastermind he crossed swords with when he worked undercover in the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). As he carefully cultivates informants from abalone divers to seafood wholesalers, he learns – to his regret – that his own actions have sometimes tragic repercussions in other people’s lives.


Marquez and his agents stake out harbors, dive sites, and houses up and down the northern California coast, and Russell’s writing brings to life many of the spots that I’ve grown to love in my adopted home state. His descriptions of the various places where the action unfolds had me feeling the fog on my face and hearing the surf in the background.


Marquez lives in a house built by his grandparents on Mt. Tamalpais. “A wooded shoulder of Mt. Tam fell away to the right of the house and below there were stands of trees, open flanks of dry grass and folded ravines with oak and brush, then the ocean. In winter he watched the leading edge of storms approach…He had a partial view of the top of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge…and still, it was dark enough at night to see the stars.”


Early in the story Marquez meets an informant near Half Moon Bay, transporting the reader along with him: “Forty minutes south of San Francisco Marquez left Highway 1 and drove through fields of pumpkins out to a broad stand of eucalyptus trees along the bluffs. Fog shrouded the high branches of the trees and under the canopy the road was wet and dark. Droplets ticked onto the hood as he parked.”


The current undercover operation has Marquez’s team based in a house in Fort Bragg, where “They met on Elm Street and walked down the old road alongside the Georgia-Pacific property, between the blackberry bushes and down to Glass Beach where for decades earlier in the past century the citizenry of Fort Bragg used to dump its garbage into the ocean. Over the years the broken china, glass, and metal had been worn by the ocean, the glass rounded like small stones that glittered now in the moonlight.”


Glass Beach is a real place that you can explore the next time you’re in Fort Bragg, as are the Sausalito docks: “Sodium lights strung along the dock hummed and swung in the wind and the shapes of Bailey and Heinemann flickered through the pale light of their rear cabin window. Across the bay, the skyline of San Francisco glowed with a hazy brilliance and as the night deepened and quieted he listened to the water lapping at the dock and faint strains of music…”


Marquez puts a lot of mileage on his truck during the course of this investigation, and just reading about the long drives involved in a day’s work made me road-weary!


Time and again the team comes within striking distance of the bad guys, only to have their bust thwarted by a turncoat informant, an unexpected maneuver by the poachers, or – the most frustrating and frequently encountered hurdle – jurisdictional problems. The cops in the small towns where the action takes place are often more of a hindrance than a help. And Marquez and his team aren’t just up against the evildoers; in this post-9/11 world, they must also deal with their wardens and patrol boats being diverted to operations for Homeland Security. Finally, the FBI seems to be after the same perpetrators as Marquez is, and they don’t care how many abalone or game wardens get caught in the crossfire.


Marquez is a believable protagonist, physically and mentally strong and devoted to his work. He’s knowledgeable as well. “A century ago, abalone had been so plentiful along the California shoreline that all you had to do was wade in a foot or two and pick them up. Shellmounds attested to how plentiful they’d once been…Diving came after the easy stuff was gone and we’re down to the end game for a species that has survived for a million years.” And yet Russell’s deft characterization prevents Marquez from being a self-righteous know-it-all.


Although everyone around him thinks he’s gone off the deep end when he jumps to the conclusion that his quarry is a shadowy figure from his own dark days in the DEA, Marquez trusts his instincts. He is emotionally grounded in the world with strong feelings for his estranged wife and stepdaughter, affection for his agents, and concern even for the informants who may be betraying him – feelings that raise the stakes as the action unfolds.


The story isn’t flawless. There are so many minor characters that I had a hard time keeping track of some of the agents on Marquez’s team and his informants. And I thought the foreshadowing of the book’s ending was a little heavy-handed.


But Marquez and those characters close to him are people I enjoyed spending time with, and I loved the glimpses of how a DFG agent works. “Tell most people that white abalone was the first ocean species humankind could genuinely claim bragging rights to extinguishing and they’d shrug. Big deal, extinctions happened. Talk about managing resources and they’d agree with you, as long as it didn’t cut into their lifestyle too much…Not much glamour in an abalone and there never would be.”


Such a down-to-earth perspective is intriguing in a world where “going green” is fast becoming more of a fashion statement than a philosophy. This John Marquez character will be worth getting to know better.


I look forward to reading the rest of Kirk Russell’s series.

Morgan’s First (Successful) Whale Watch

My wonderful husband Morgan loves to tease me and knows he can always punch my hot buttons when he makes fun of my interests in ecology, conservation, and wildlife. So when I started planning our February 2008 trip to Maui, he pretended blasé disinterest. When I told friends I couldn’t wait to set eyes upon the humpback whales – creatures I’d been longing to see in their winter playground ever since I learned about their migration habits back in elementary school (I’m 42 now!) – he would shrug and say, “Ah, you’ve seen one big fish, you’ve seen 'em all,” shooting me a mischievous sidelong look.

Two plus years of marriage have taught me not to rise to the bait. My inner schoolteacher – or maybe she’s my inner encyclopedia fact-checker, I’m not sure – clamped her lips shut on the outgraged “Whales aren’t fish!” that she wanted to shoot back. And as far as seen one, seen 'em all…he was entitled to a bit of cynicism, since we hadn't seen a single whale on our previous attempt at whalewatching last summer.

The whalewatching part of our trip began officially on Thursday evening. While I was diving Molokini and Turtle Arches, Morgan had remained behind in California, slaving away for his corporate masters for a few more days. He finally flew to Maui after work on Wednesday and slept in Thursday morning while I went on yet another dive excursion. And so our sunset cruise aboard Ocean Voyager, a whalewatch boat run by The Pacific Whale Foundation out of Maalea harbor, was Morgan’s first taste of the humpbacks I’d been raving about on the phone every night when I called him.

I had our binoculars around my neck, and he carried our Nikon D200 with a 70-300 mm zoom lens. We boarded the big boat and took spots in the almost bleacher-like seats on the bow, and as we watched the ocean on the other side of the breakwater that forms the tiny harbor, a whale breached just a couple of hundred feet away.



It happened in a flash. A huge, dark, submarine-shaped creature broke the surface of the beautiful blue water. It soared into the air at about a 70-degree angle until it’s entire 40-foot-long body except for its tail flukes was visible. Water cascaded from its form, flowing down the beautiful dark creases of its white throat and belly, glittering like icing on the frilly margin of tubercles crenellating its fifteen-foot-long pectoral fins. Then it fell back into the water with a monumental splash, twisting around and landing on its back. White foam spewed thirty feet into the air, and everyone who had been looking in that direction surged to their feet with a gasp and a cry of “Look at that!” or “Over there!” or “Did you see that?!”

Everyone.





Including my supposedly jaded and blasé husband, who had peeled the lens cap off the camera and was holding it up, trained on the now smooth spot in the water where the whale had vanished. Farther out towards the horizon another whale breached, and then off to our left, a few hundred yards from where the first breaching humpback had disappeared, another whale rolled on the surface, smacking its pectoral fins in a frenzy of splashing.

All that before we even got out of the harbor.

Our big motorized catamaran soon pulled out of the harbor and we were free to wander the decks, munching on appetizers and sipping mai tais and soft drinks. Everyone on board, Morgan included, was pointing and gasping and oohing and ahhing almost nonstop. We were surrounded by whales performing their aquatic ballet.

The naturalist on board spoke over the public address system about the lifecycle of the whales and commented on the behaviors we were seeing. The humpbacks we were seeing had spent their summers off the west coast of North America, anywhere from Northern California to the waters off Alaska, feeding on schools of small fish and krill that they swallow by the ton. In autumn they had started migrating to the waters off Maui, where they spend the winter months giving birth to and caring for their calves, or mating. Some had traveled the 3500 miles between their feeding and breeding grounds in as little as 30 days!




On that first whalewatch trip, the whale activity seemed to die down as the sun fell towards the horizon. There were fewer breaches and tail slaps, and many more fluke up dives.

Researchers are able to track individual whales because each has unique markings on their tail flukes, which they typically raise out of the water – and hold in perfect position for photographing – just before they make a deep dive. Researchers and volunteers from the Pacific Whale Foundation count whales and photograph as many flukes as they can every year, and share the information with researchers working on the West Coast of North America to track the humpack population’s health.
The captain motored the boat slowly, often changing direction to either avoid humpbacks that had surfaced nearby, or to check out behavior happening nearby. At one point the captain stopped the boat and let us drift while the crew lowered a hydrophone and we eavesdropped on the singers.



While that first whalewatch was beautiful against the sunset backdrop, the whalewatch we took a few days later out of Lahaina was even more exciting. We were on another of the Pacific Whale Foundation’s boats, and had barely cleared the harbor when a mother whale surfaced nearby and started slapping her tail down on the water. The slaps rang out like cannon shots. The display went on for several minutes, giving us a good chance to get lots of photos. I had to admire the strength and endurance of the whale as she raised her tail – which measured at least 15 feet wide, and must have weighed at least a ton – and brought it down with a majestic splash again and again.

We also saw more close-up breaches, including one male who breached 23 times in a row – the naturalist narrating our journey and answering questions over the public address system said she and the rest of the crew couldn’t remember ever seeing such a persistent breacher!

Morgan gave up trying to be blasé as he and I passed the camera and the binoculars back and forth. We ended up being very glad we had brought extra memory cards. You can see more of our photos taken on our two whalewatch trips at http://picasaweb.google.com/BoomersParents/MauiFebruary2008

I highly recommend that you go whalewatching with the Pacific Whale Foundation next time you are in Maui during whale season. Their snorkeling trip to Molokini and Turtle Arches was also a lot of fun. Purchasing a membership gets you discounts on boat tours and merchandise from their wonderful shop in Maalea. Check out their web site, where you can do everything from reading whalewatch logs to ordering T-shirts to making advance reservations for tours, at http://www.pacificwhale.org/

The First Singer

(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of another of our memorable wildlife encounters.)

We were motoring in towards the southwest shore of Maui, having completed our first dive in Molokini crater, when Andy slowed the boat and craned his neck, peering out over the bow at the water ahead.

Divers, divemaster, and deckhand all lunged to our feet and peered in that direction; this was my second day with the crew, and I knew by now that slowing down probably meant he had spotted whale activity of some sort.

“I think it’s a singer,” he said, pointing ahead of us as he slowed the boat to a dead stop and cut the engine. “I just saw it dive, and I’m pretty sure it’s alone. If I’m right, he’s hanging motionless underwater, with his head lower than his tail, and he’s signing. If we’re quiet, we may be able to hear him.”

We all stood silent as the boat drifted in the direction Andy had seen the whale submerge. At first the predominant noise was the slap of waves on the metal hull, but after a couple of minutes the boat found her groove and the slapping vanished. I heard a phrase of faint, deep moaning that lasted just a few seconds. When I looked around, wondering if my imagination was running away with me – I’d heard recorded whale songs dozens of times in my life – I was pleased to see that others heard it, too.

Andy was nodding excitedly. “Everybody put an ear on the railing,” he said, demonstrating the pose himself.

Somewhat skeptical, I set my ear against one of the round metal pipes that formed a cage-like railing system all around the boat – and heard more moaning, higher-pitched and very distinct. The metal hull of the boat amplified the sound like the body of an acoustic guitar and transmitted it through the railing to our ears. “Hey, Andy, pull the string tighter, I can’t hear so well,” deckhand Jeff joked, referring to the tin-can-and-string “phones” we had all played with as kids.

The sounds were fascinating:

• Long, drawn-out moans at high, medium, and low pitches. The low-pitched ones really reverberated through the boat and into your flesh and bones.
• Short, deep “huh” sounds that made me thing of punctuation marks.
• Short and long squeals that reminded me a bit of recordings of dolphins, but seemed a bit lower-pitched and more drawn out to my untrained ear.
• Noises I can only describe as “bubbly” – the sort of “glub glub” effect you get if you try to speak with your mouth underwater in a swimming pool.

The sounds got louder as we drifted over the singer, then started to fade as we drifted past him and away. When Andy was sure we were a safe distance past the singer, he started the boat and motored slowly away. We had listened for about fifteen minutes, and the song would go on for another five to ten minutes.

Although female humpbacks issue short vocalizations, only the males of the species sing, and they only do it when they are here in their Hawaiian islands breeding waters. Researchers don’t know if every male of breeding age does it, but many do. They also don’t know what prompts them to start, or why they sometimes sing over and over again and other times take breaks in between.

Remember singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” in school when you were a kid? The teacher would divide up the class into three groups, and group one would start whie group two would wait and start with “Row, row, row” as the first group began “Merrily, merrily…”, and then group three would join in later stil? The whale singing is like that, but far less organized!

Being underwater or listening through a hydrophone, you often hear several males singing simultaneously. They are all singing the same song, but in a “round,” so that the first phrases of one singer overlay the second chorus of another and the fifth of yet another.

There is one song for the season, and all males sing that song, with one of them occasionally making a change that all the other singers then immediately pick up on and incorporate into their songs. Nobody knows why they introduce these changes. The changes accumulate over the season, which runs from January through May, and by the time the whales leave the Hawaiian islands to go feed in the waters off Alaska, the song has changed considerably. When the first hydrophone picks up the first singer next year, he’ll be singing exactly the song that they left off with at the end of the 2008 season, and over the course of the season, other males will introduce changes so that it’s a different song by the end of the 2009 season.

The noise carries for miles; other whales, with their highly attuned hearing, can hear it for at least 25 miles around, while we mere humans, when submerged, can pick up the tune broadcast my a male some five to seven miles away. Scientists are sure it has to do with breeding, but they have yet to fully explain the meanings of the songs. It could be anything from advertising his presence to showing off his fitness for mating – we may never know the true meaning to another whale.

Close Encounter with Humpback Whales

(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of one of our memorable wildlife encounters, which happened before I even got my gear on!)

During Captain Andy’s introduction talk aboard the Pi’iili Kai, he went over all the usual safety stuff, pointed out various features of the boat – the side gates we would giant-stride out of, the stern ladders we’d use to get back onto the boat at the end of the dive -- and ran through what the day would probably be like. Then he said our first dive would be out at Molokini crater. “Usually it takes us 15 minutes to motor out there,” he said. “But this is humpback season, so it could take us a lot longer!”

Whales have right of way around Maui, which is the center of the Humpback National Marine Sanctuary. Also, since the humpback is both on the Endangered Species List and protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, people are supposed to give the humpbacks a wide berth – 100 yards, by law. “Sometimes these guys pop up right in front of the boat with no warning and I have to slam on the brakes,” Andy warned us. “It’s like having a three-year-old run out in front of your car.”

So it was no surprise to any of us that, five minutes into our cruise between Kihei boat ramp and Molokini, we were veering off course to avoid a small pod comprising mom, calf, and escort. Our veer took us closer to another pod, though, just as one of them started doing pectoral slaps. Andy cut the engine and we drifted, watching the 40-something foot long beast roll back and forth on the calm surface of the ocean, repeatedly flinging one 15-foot-long front flipper skyward and then bring it down on the water with a resounding smack. White water fountained up around the graceful pectoral fin each time it plunged into the sea, and cascaded off it again as the pec rose for another slap.

The long pectoral fins are relatively narrow and look thin compared to the animal they are attached to. Dark on the upper side, white beneath, they are rounded at the tips and have a lacy crenellation around the edges, which often carry barnacles the size of a toddler’s fist.
After a few slaps another pec – this one belonging to another 40-something-foot-long leviathan – rose into the air and smacked down, doubling both the sound and the whitewater fury of the display. The first humpback brought its second pectoral fin into play, rolling rapidly back and forth, smacking down first one, then the other, as though to outdo its competition. The only other sound was the occasional blast of a humpback expelling a breath at 300 miles per hour through the paired blowholes, or nostrils, on top of its head.

We drifted for five or ten minutes, and the pectoral slapping display showed no signs of abating as Andy started the engine and turned us again towards our dive spot. Researchers suspect the slapping is a form of communication between humpbacks – the sound carries for quite a distance both above and below water – but what it really means is for the whales to know and us to wonder.