Toward the finish of the Sydney-Hobart yacht race, a leading boat sights a dingy crewed by a bloated corpse - wearing only Bermuda shorts and a six-inch galley knife in its back.
When Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, aka Pufferfish, is assigned the case, it seems that any clues have sunk to the cold depths of the Southern Ocean. But when the break does come it's big, and Pufferfish finds himself hooked into a trail leading across the Australian mainland to the plush condos and drug culture of California - right to the core of the multibillion-dollar illegal trade in wildlife.