Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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  • Mike Scott Thrillers
    • Held Hostage: Search for the Juncal
    • Water Crisis: Day Zero
    • Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters
    • The 3rd Key: Sharks in the Water
    • Oil and Water: Crash in Curacao
    • Return to Cayman: Paradise Held Hostage
    • Heart of the Maya: Murder for the Gods
    • Wreck of the Huron: Cuban Secrets
    • Guardians’ Keep: Mystery below the Adriatic
    • Flooding Hollywood: Fanatics at the Dam
    • Cayman Cowboys: Reefs Under Pressure
  • Withrow Key
    • Lyin’ Fish
    • Tales from Withrow Key
  • Agent AJ West
  • About the Author
    • Publicity and Interviews
  • Nonfiction
    • For Cheap Lobster
    • Heart Survivor: Recovery After Heart Surgery
    • Oral History
      • Batter Up!
      • Memories of the Valley
      • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
      • Capturing Memories: How to Record Oral Histories
    • Dive-abled: The Leo Morales Story
    • Keep on, Keepin’ On: A Breast Cancer Story
    • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
    • Russia: The New Age
    • Scuba Diving Safety
  • Free Short Fiction
  • Other Fiction
    • Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories
    • River Town
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Turks and Chaos for the new year!

December 27, 2017 By Eric Douglas

Happy New Year my friends!

As we bring 2017 to a close, all I can say is “whew. I’m glad that’s over.”

Just kidding. This year has come with some challenges, but every year is what you make of it and this was a productive one. I released four books this year.

The year began with Heart Survivor: Recovery After Heart Surgery. This book continues to be popular as, unfortunately, new people are facing this diagnosis every day.

In the summer, The 3rd Key: Sharks in the Water took everyone on a trip to the Florida Keys. This story packed a lot of action and excitement into just a couple days.

In November, the biography Dive-abled: The Leo Morales Story told the inspiring story of a young man who used the power of the ocean to overcome the loss of a leg to cancer, and to set some diving records along the way.

And for Christmas, the latest Mike Scott thriller novella hit the streets: Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters. This is the ninth installment in the Mike Scott series. Set entirely on a liveaboard dive boat, it’s a great way to warm up the winter months!

Thank you for coming along for the ride and I hope you got a chance to escape from your day-to-day with Mike Scott. Remember, reviews are the life-blood of an author. If you’ve read any of my books, please leave a review and let others know what you thought.

I am looking forward to an exciting 2018.

Happy New Year!

Eric

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, New Releases

New Mike Scott thriller novella available for Christmas

December 7, 2017 By Eric Douglas

ThTurks and Chaos: Hostile Waters thriller novellae latest thriller novella the Mike Scott series, Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters, is now available for pre-order across all ebook formats at a special introductory price, author Eric Douglas announced.

The ninth installment in the series, this story is a thriller novella. It will be officially available on Dec. 25, as a Christmas present to readers. Between now and Christmas day, the story is priced at just $0.99. When the story goes live, the ebook novella price will go up to $2.99. A softcover version of the book will also be available on the release date.

“I wanted to challenge myself with this story a bit. No bringing in outside help or equipment. This story is entirely set on board a liveaboard dive boat,” Douglas said. “Most of the Mike Scott stories feature the location as an additional character, but this was different. It was confining, but also liberating at the same time. I had to focus on characters and limit them to what was onboard.”

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters

Armed gunmen board a liveaboard dive boat near Turks and Caicos in this sea story/action thriller. News photographer Mike Scott is on a dive vacation and gets taken hostage when the theft doesn’t go as planned. When the identity of the head pirate is exposed, he declares that all the passengers will die when they reach their destination. It’s up to Mike, the passengers and crew to overcome the pirates and save their own lives. It doesn’t help matters that there is a mole on board feeding the pirates information and they are heading right into a storm. Now they must rebel against the pirates and take the boat back before time runs out…

Pre-order your copy of this Mike Scott thriller today and have it ready to read on Christmas morning!

Early Reviews

“Fans of Clive Cussler will enjoy this brand-new novella in the Mike Scott thriller series from Eric Douglas.” Greg Holt, host of the talk radio show ScubaRadio.

“…a great “Murder on the Orient Express” set up going, where everyone is captive and most everyone is suspect. It gives the story a nice whodunit quality…” Suzanne Garrett

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, New Releases

New novel covers and Cayman Cowboys is free everywhere!

November 7, 2017 By Eric Douglas

When I began writing the Mike Scott books, one of my goals was to introduce more people to the beauty and joy of the underwater world – hopefully inspiring the next generation of adventurers like Jacques Cousteau inspired me. To help make that happen, I’ve made two changes to the Mike Scott thriller series.

First, Cayman Cowboys is now FREE to download from your favorite ebook retailer. It’s in all ebook formats including Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Smashwords, Kobo and others. Share this with your friends who might be interested in a fun read, but also might be interested in learning about the ocean and diving as well.

And, its not just Cayman Cowboys that is available everywhere, but the entire Mike Scott thriller series is also available on all ebook platforms. iBooks? Yep. Nook? You got it. Smashwords, Inkwell or any one of the others? There too. Now, there’s no reason not to read a Mike Scott thriller book. This includes the box sets as well.

You’ll also notice that the entire series of books have new covers. For some, it was just a change in the font. Others got a complete makeover with the addition of a subtitle, new image and new graphics.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the diving season is pretty much over and winter is setting in. But that doesn’t mean you can’t read about diving and the oceans!

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving

New covers, all Mike Scott novels

October 12, 2017 By Eric Douglas

As the Mike Scott novels have been published (starting in 2004) each book has been a separate entity. Now that there is an entire series, Eric decided the books need a cohesive look to give readers the ability to immediately identify them when they see them online or in a book store.

These are prototypes of the new covers for the entire series, so comments are welcome. The font is the same throughout. The text is in either black or white with the same treatment on each. Placement is either at the top of the cover or the bottom, depending on the image.

We’ve also added subtitles to the books that didn’t already have one.

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving

Marshall divers studying native mussels in Ohio River

October 10, 2017 By Eric Douglas

Originally published in the Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail on September 29, 2017.

 

Imagine jumping into the Ohio River, the cool end-of-summer water covering your head, and then descending to the bottom, staying there and searching in the dark through the muck, sand, rocks and submerged trees for freshwater mussels for an hour.

Graduate student Mitchell Kriege is finishing a research project in the Marshall University environmental sciences program. He and a team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Tom Jones, have been diving in the river and then completing surveys of the freshwater mussels they find on the river bottom.

On a recent September Saturday morning, the group met at the university and drove the boat to a remote ramp on the Ohio. It’s difficult to call what the team does diving. They are underwater for an hour breathing compressed air, but they don’t wear fins, and they don’t swim. They crawl along on the bottom, fanning away silt and mud, feeling for mussels.

They find mussels with common names, like black sandshell, three-horn wartyback, pimpleback, washboard, three-ridge, deertoe and sheepnose (which is listed as an endangered species on the federal register.) Zebra mussels, an invasive species they don’t study but that are often attached to the mussels they are looking for, have a razor-sharp edge that causes fine cuts on their hands.

According to Kriege, the eastern United States is the hot spot for mussel diversity in the world.

“We are the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest, but for mussels. It is important to study them because they are so heavily imperiled,” he said.

“This project will be the first time we have a statistically defendable estimate of the mussels in the Greenup Pool, or anywhere in the Ohio River to my knowledge,” Jones said. “More species of mussels are federally listed than any other taxonomic group by percentage. Some authors cite almost 70 percent of mussel species have some federal protection due to rarity.”

The research project includes 20 randomly chosen locations on the river. At each location, the team lays out 100-meter-long weighted lines from the bank toward the middle of the river. A diver then enters the water and collects every mussel to be found in a 1-meter-wide swath along that line, placing them in mesh bags.

These swaths are called transects. Every 10 meters, the diver clips off the bag and begins a new one. When finished with the dive, the diver has surveyed a 100 square meters of river bottom.

At each location, they make six transects, each one 100 meters downriver from the previous one. For his master’s degree thesis, Kriege will produce maps showing the locations and dispersal of the various types of mussels in the river.

Jones explained freshwater mussels filter bacteria, fungi, protozoan and algae from the water column.

“In essence, they clean our drinking water for us. They also alter their substrates by movement and provide food to other species, both by being eaten and by producing pseudo-feces that bugs and fishes consume,” he said.

Healthy mussels on the river bottom aren’t just a nice thing to have. They benefit everyone.

“Each mussel filters anywhere from 5 to 20 gallons of water per day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If one mussel filters 10 gallons of water a day, that’s 3,650 gallons a year. When you get to talking about populations in the millions, you begin to realize how much money mussels are saving the taxpayers,” Kriege said. “Mussels not only clean the water we drink, they act as food for a wide array of organisms — muskrats, fish, etc., and their dead shells act as homes for many macroinvertebrates, fish and aquatic eggs.”

After each dive, the crew brings the 100-meter line to the surface with the mesh bags attached. They carefully measure and identify each mussel and record its statistics, before returning it to the river, where it can continue growing.

Before they are returned to the river, though, the zebra mussels are pulled loose. Zebra mussels attach themselves to just about anything underwater, including other larger mussels, and can kill them in the process. Removing the zebra mussels gives the native mussels a better chance at survival. Kriege explained that they do this for the mussels caught in the survey since they were dislodged from the bottom in the first place.

“This project has opened up my mind to the incredible number of mussels present in the Ohio River. There are literally hundreds of millions of individuals in our pool with 25-plus species. However, it has also opened my eyes to the sad truth of the incredible habitats and wide array of species we lost when the river was dammed and heavily polluted. About half of the sites we surveyed were heavily impacted by humans and nearly devoid of mussels. Historically their numbers would have easily been in the billions in just a short section or river.”

Eric Douglas, of Pinch, is the author of “Return to Cayman,” “Heart of the Maya,” “Cayman Cowboys,” “River Town” and other novels. He is also a columnist for Scuba Diving Magazine and a former Charleston Newspapers Metro staff writer. For more information, visit www.booksbyeric.com or contact him at Eric@www.booksbyeric.com.

Filed Under: Adventure, Diving, Photography, Travel

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