Malcolm Forbes, The Minnesota Star Tribune

Author-adventurer Richard Halifax is declared legally dead on May 28, 1939, after disappearing in the Pacific.

No stranger to danger, the Kansas City-born “world traveler for the stay-at-home crowd” enjoyed a career of arduous hikes, heroic swims and intrepid journeys in planes, trains and automobiles. His last, uncompleted expedition proved to be his most ambitious: a voyage in a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco.

Peter Mann’s second novel opens with the death of its protagonist. Or so it seems. “World Pacific” is an elaborately structured book full of sharp twists and false bottoms. Halifax is no dead man. Indeed, as he gets out of his depth, both at sea and on dry land, in a variety of treacherous scrapes and duplicitous schemes,

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