Pirate Latitudes - A Novel

Pirate Latitudes is an action adventure novel written by Michael Crichton. The book was published posthumously by HarperCollins on November 24, 2009. It is an adventure story concerning piracy in Jamaica in the 17th century. The novel stars the fictional privateer Captain Charles Hunter who, together with the governor of Jamaica, plots to raid a Spanish galleon for its treasure. Johnathan Burnham's review states that it is "thoroughly researched...packed through with great detail about navigation and how pirates operated, and links between the New World and the Caribbean and Spain. Background history The novel was discovered on one of Crichton's computers by his assistant after the author's death, along with an unfinished novel, Micro, published in 2011. According to Jonathan Burnham, a publisher of an imprint of HarperCollins, the book had been written concurrently with Crichton's most recent novel, Next. According to Marla Warren, however, there is evidence that Crichton had been working on the novel at least since the 1970s; to substantiate her position, she quotes a statement by Patrick McGilligan in the March 1979 issue of American Film that Crichton was aiming "to complete a long-standing book project about Caribbean pirates in the seventeenth century." Crichton also mentions the project in his non-fiction title "Travels," published in 1988.