"Doug Tobin is in prison now, a felon who for decades used the Seattle area as his base for poaching and selling shellfish, especially a type of clam known as a geoduck.

As the environmental reporter for The Seattle Times, Craig Welch noticed a brief item in his own newspaper about the arrest of five poachers who had allegedly sold geoducks for more than $3 million.

At the time of the arrests, Welch knew nothing about Tobin or geoducks. "Who poaches clams and who hunts clam poachers?" he asked himself. He learned that a case from the 1980s had involved a geoduck smuggler who paid a hit man to harm a rival, not to mention a poacher who agreed to serve as an undercover agent for federal law enforcers. Welch could not restrain himself. He felt compelled to write poaching stories for the newspaper and think about writing a book.

As Welch wrote about poached geoducks and otter pelts and mosses from Mount St. Helens National Monument and law enforcers who tried to catch the thieves, he realized that the plants and animals usually ended up in overseas markets.

When Welch found time to write the book "Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature's Bounty" (William Morrow, 288 pp., $25.99), it had morphed from a Puget Sound saga to an international detective story. Still, it is very much a Washington-state/Seattle-area tale.

The most quoted law-enforcement characters hail from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The heroine prosecutor, Helen (Micki) Brunner, is an assistant U.S. attorney with a Seattle office. Tobin, the most quoted of the bad guys, is a Native American from Puget Sound's Squaxin Island Tribe."

Get the Story:
Book Review by Steve Weinberg: 'Shell Games': the high-stakes underworld of shellfish poaching (The Seattle Times 4/9)