CLOSE TO SHORE

Catching the scent of a younger audience, Capuzzo tears out great gobbets of social history from his adult work for this more action-oriented children’s version. Strewing period photos and sensationalistic news clippings throughout, the author delivers a ripping account of the brief but bloody career of a single juvenile Great White who developed a taste for Jersey swimmers and sent much of the Atlantic seaboard into a panic. Characterizing the shark as a piscine serial killer, Capuzzo sweeps readers between grisly attacks with appetizing glimpses of the area’s elegant hotels and vacationers as well as reconstructions of the shark’s origins and behavior, and info-bites about similar encounters, all delivered in orotund prose: “The fish moved with the precision and trajectory of an enormous bullet, a shot somehow fired in slow motion through the medium of the sea.” Readers who slavered over Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974), which was inspired by the incident, may prefer to sink their teeth into this partially flensed reworking. (afterword) (Nonfiction. 11-13)