Jack Emerson Davis

Ned's college film club is making a spooky vampire movie set in an old deserted mansion — and Nancy is the star! The popular detective has also been asked to model in a series of TV commercials for a new beauty product. As if that were not enough to keep Nancy busy, she has a couple of cases to solve. A valuable racehorse has been stolen from a nearby farm. It is up to Nancy to figure out which of its owner's many enemies may have taken the prize thoroughbred. There's also another mystery around. Someone keeps disturbing the film club as they are shooting their film. When a building goes up in flames, it is time to take the disruption seriously! Nancy has two deadlines to beat — to return the missing horse before its big race and to help Ned and his friends finish their horror film — before some mysterious force ruins everything!

Significant beyond tragic oil spills and hurricanes, the Gulf has historically been one of the world's most bounteous marine environments, supporting human life for millennia. Based on the premise that nature lies at the center of human existence, Davis takes readers on a compelling and, at times, wrenching journey from the Florida Keys to the Texas Rio Grande, along marshy shorelines and majestic estuarine bays, both beautiful and life-giving, though fated to exploitation by esurient oil men and real-estate developers. Davis shares previously untold stories, parading a vast array of historical characters past our view: sports-fishermen, presidents, Hollywood executives, New England fishers, the Tabasco king, a Texas shrimper, and a New York architect who caught the "big one". Sensitive to the imminent effects of climate change, and to the difficult task of rectifying the assaults of recent centuries, this book suggests how a penetrating examination of a single region's history can inform the country's path ahead. --