Insurance investigator Brent Calloway may be too hard-boiled to crack a smile, but he'll go to any length to crack a case. As tough, terse and tireless as insurance man Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, Calloway's about to go to extremes to see to it that one ship makes it safely from Hawaii to the mainland. Going undercover and posing as ruthless killer Spike O'Brien, Calloway quickly discovers that on this ship nothing is what it seems, and no one can be trusted. With so much insurance money at stake, and the whole crew apparently in on the scam, this could end up being a voyage to the bottom of the sea.... And when the real Spike O'Brien shows up, it's Calloway who'll need a good insurance policy. Because life is cheap when the stakes are so high-on a ship of lies bearing a False Cargo. A veteran sailor who had voyaged long and far, L. Ron Hubbard knew well the life at sea. He once wrote in his journal: "There is something magnificently terrible about a savage sea in the unwholesome green of half-dawn.... The ship is an unreal, fragile thing, full of strange groans, and engine and sails are dwarfed in their puny power when matched to all the countless horsepower in wave and wind and current. The whole world is an awesome threat. Alone, wet, hungry, hand cramped upon a tiller, a sailor knows more truth in those hours than all mankind in his millions of years." Also includes the sea adventure "Grounded", in which a Royal Air Force lieutenant loses a friend and tarnishes his reputation, and sets out in search of redemption ... no matter the price.

It was an age of evolution, when size and speed were almost the ultimate considerations. Bigger was said to be better, and ship owners were not exempted from the prevailing mood, while the German four-stackers of 1897-06 and then Cunard's brilliant "Mauretania" & "Lusitania" of 1907 led the way to larger and grander liners. White Star Line countered by 1911 with the "Olympic," her sister "Titanic," and a near-sister, the "Britannic." The French added the "France" while Cunard took delivery of the beloved" Aquitania." But the Germans won out--they produced the 52,000-ton "Imperator" and a near-sister, the "Vaterland," the last word in shipbuilding and engineering prior to World War I. They and their sister, the "Bismarck," remained the biggest ships in the world until 1935. But other passenger ships appear in this decade--other Atlantic liners, but also ships serving on more diverse routes: Union Castle to Africa, P&O to India and beyond, the Empress liners on the trans-Pacific run. We look at a grand age of maritime creation, ocean-going superlative, but also sad destruction in the dark days of the First War. It was, in all ways, a fascinating period.