It is usual, and prudent, to claim that no characters in any novel are based on real people, which claim is certainly true of the characters in Crackdown, yet the fictional island of Murder Cay is based on the all too real Bahamian island of Norman’s Cay, and for details of that island, as well as for much other information about the narcotraficantes, I am indebted to the book The Cocaine Wars by Paul Eddy, Hugo Sabogal and Sara Walden.

I must also acknowledge my extreme debt to Dr Laura Reid, erstwhile Medical Director of the Gosnold Treatment Center in Falmouth, Cape Cod, who educated me about cocaine, and about the difficulties faced by her patients who are trying to break their cocaine addictions.

It seems to me that the true warriors of the drug war are people like Laura Reid and her colleagues whose battles and victories are rarely headlined. To them, and to all their patients who have defeated the evil, Crackdown is respectfully dedicated.

You cannot cheat death. It is not an illusion. It does not melt into air, into thin air, it is instead a clumsy thing of the night, to be discovered in the dawn.

And it was in the dawn, in a gentle Bahamian dawn, that I discovered Hirondelle.

She had been a cruising yacht; a pretty thirty-eight-foot fibreglass sloop. She had been a graceful thing, and she had been butchered.

When I found Hirondelle she was nothing but a barely floating derelict, so low in the water that I might have missed her altogether except that a heave of her sluggish hull flashed a reflection of the sun’s new wan light from a polished deck-fitting into my eyes. I was so tired that I almost took no notice, assuming that the scrap of light had been mirrored from a discarded and floating beer can, but something made me pick up my binoculars and there she was; a dead creature which rolled under the blows of the short dawn chop.