Ship of Ghosts (2006) is the story of the USS Houston (CA-30), which entered the annals of our most compelling naval mysteries when she was lost off Java early in World War II. The final radio message from her captain gave no hint of the odds his crew had faced—and told nothing of the ordeal the ship’s survivors would confront as slaves on the notorious Burma-Thailand Death Railway, the inspiration for the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. A main selection of the History Book Club and the Military Book Club, Ship of Ghosts was a 2007 winner of the U.S. Maritime Book Award.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004) is the first full narrative account of the Battle off Samar, considered the greatest upset victory in the U.S. Navy’s history. A main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Military Book Club, Last Stand was a charter selection of the Navy Professional Reading Program and received the 2004 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature. It was chosen as one of “a dozen Navy classics” by the U.S. Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine (December 2008) and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books on men at war (April 24, 2010).

Neptune’s Inferno (2011) is an intimately cast epic narrative of the brutal naval campaign for the seas around Guadalcanal Island in late 1942. America’s first concerted offensive of World War II, the six-month contest for control of those vital seaways involved seven major naval battles in which the U.S. proved it had the implacable will to match the Imperial Japanese war machine blow for violent blow. Written from new interviews with survivors, unpublished eyewitness accounts, and newly available documents, it is the first major work on this essential subject in almost two decades.