Sharks have fascinated and terrified man for millennia. Peter Benchley"s classic shocker Jaws played on modern fear of the shark which encapsulates so many of our deepest fears and phobias. But even Benchley"s man-eating monster pales into insignificance alongside the clinical ferocity of the infamous bull shark of Nicaragua, a perfectly adapted killing-machine at home in both salt and fresh water and the subject of Edward Marriott"s compelling Wild Shore: Life and Death with Nicaragua"s Last Shark Hunters. In his travel-writing debut, the critically acclaimed Lost Tribe, Marriott adopted an uneasy stance as suspicious foreigner and outsider during his travels. In Wild Shore he takes up this position once more as he pursues his obsession with the bull shark, from the bleak Atlantic coast inland along the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua, trying to befriend those "reviled by the marine biology establishment": the shark hunters. Marriott soon learns to his horror that "in Nicaragua, any man with a dug-out and a hand line could turn shark hunter". Some of the finest sections of the book graphically record his own terrifying encounters with the shark. In the process he learns that the ruthless hunting of the bull shark answers a deeper need than the struggle for financial survival: "it was hard to believe there wasn"t some measure of revenge in the very scale of the slaughter: a desperate assertion of man"s supremacy, coupled with a horror of the deep, of everything unseen."However, as Marriott travels upriver on a voyage that crosses Jaws with Heart of Darkness, Wild Shore turns into an absorbing account of the uneven economic development and political depredations which continue to beset postcolonial Nicaragua. "The shark was indivisible from the region"s difficult history",the author concludes in this fine piece of travel writing. --Jerry Brotton