The Treasure of the Black Swan by Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral

I thought this was pure fiction, some kind of adventure story. That's what I'd expected from Paco Roca's other work, and the vague Tintin-esque vibes this book gave off reinforced that.

But The Treasure of the Black Swan is mostly true, if slightly fictionalized - the story of the real Black Swan Project, and the court battle between a US undersea salvage company and the Spanish government, after the former plundered a shipwreck they pretended was somewhere else and from a British ship. It was also the basis of a TV series, LA Fortuna, which I didn't know before reading it.

Roca just drew this project, as far as I can tell. His collaborator, Guillermo Corral, is a career diplomat who was involved in the case, and Corral wrote this book - wrote in a version of himself as Alex Ventura, a very junior staffer at the Spanish Ministry of Culture who is our viewpoint and central figure.

I very vaguely remember seeing the coverage of this case from 2007 through 2015, though Corral has changed the names here. (And possibly some facts - there's a plot point about some attempted ratfuckery by the salvage company through the US Senate passing a new law that I think would completely fail on the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws.)

Anyway, the salvage company, here called Ithaca - the real-world equivalent is Odyssey - salvaged roughly half a billion dollars worth of gold and silver coins from a wreck. We see some of their actions, and think they're being at least a bit shady, flying it out quietly and quickly to Florida, and possibly trying to obscure exactly where in the ocean they were exploring. The Spanish government learns of the find, and sues for its return in US court.

The rest is the story of the court fight, with a US lawyer who has been battling Ithaca for decades brought on board - despite Ithaca trying to entangle his firm with a conflict of interest. Alex works with an expert whom he comes to have a romance with, and there's a lot of delving into records and trying to prove what ship or ships this find could potentially have come from. (I detected what seem to be a lot of shady discovery actions, or more accurately avoidance of actions, by Ithaca in this book, and I note that the real-world Odyssey had to pay a million-dollar penalty after the end of the litigation for what seems to be primarily that.)

Anyway, it's long and complicated, full of details and experts and motions back and forth in various US courts, but in the end, the good guys (the Spanish government) win, and the treasure is flown back to Spain and deposited in a museum. Oh, and Alex gets the "girl" - she's almost a decade older than he is, and more settled in her career.

Roca, as always, has a pleasant storytelling style, though it comes across more meat-and-potatoes here, where he has a lot of details (both the technicalities of litigation and just what all of these specialized salvage devices and ancient coins look like) to get onto his pages. This is a denser, more serious book than the Tintin hints might imply, and wouldn't be my first choice for an introduction to Roca's work - though it's great for anyone already interested in marine archaeology, salvage, or complicated court cases.