This mystery – set in 1902 Portland – shows a colorful but corrupt city

If you were a single man strolling in Portland’s Old Town a century ago, you might have been clubbed, drugged and dragged onto a schooner bound for China or a worm-riddled whaler headed for the Bering Straits. It didn’t pay to complain too much–that is, if you didn’t want to get thrown into the sea.

The practice was called “shanghaiing” and it was common on the West Coast, with Portland as a key center.

Shanghaiing, preferred by Portland’s business leaders because it cut shipping costs, is at the center of Land Sharks, a new mystery by Oregon author, Susan Stoner. This book is the second in a series featuring Sage Adair and has him trying to find out what happened to a labor organizer who has disappeared, leaving behind a wife and baby.

Using authentic historical details, the book shows readers a different Portland–a time when houses of prostitution flourished, illegal votes bought corrupt judges and companies’ opposition to unions took the form of murder. The reader follows Adair out of the seedy saloons and into Portland’s extensive underground and through its tunnels to the waterfront, past cages where drugged men were imprisoned and waiting to learn their fates as shanghaied men.

Midwest Book Reviews called Land Sharks “riveting.”