The Devil's Teeth is the story of a pair of biologists, Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson, who spent a decade studying great white sharks off the Farrallon Islands, which lie just 30 miles due west of San Francisco.

The title, The Devil's Teeth, doesn't refer to the sharks but rather to the islands themselves, a nickname they were given by sailors back in the1800s. It's an apt one. They rise up from the sea, canine-like, to form one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet. Fierce winds regularly whip them. The sea constantly pounds them. Hundreds of thousands of sea birds congregate to mate on them, cawing and screeching in a deafening cacophony that sounds like something straight out of the ninth circle of hell. Kelp flies swarm -- having already spent time lodged in the anuses of the local seal population. Death and destruction lie all around, from the countless birds pecked to death by other birds, to the seals and sea lions ripped apart in bloody spectacles by the sharks circling just offshore. There are only two houses on the islands and the revolving team of biologists who live in them swear they're haunted. But as the author, Susan Casey, points out, ghosts on the Farrallones would simply be overkill. Their wild desolation -- how they repel the vast majority of people who set foot on them but suck in a tiny percentage who learn to love them -- is described beautifully throughout.

Back to the sharks, though. For several months a year, the Farrallones are home to the densest congregation of large great whites in the world. Thirteen-footers are considered runts. Pyle and Anderson have spent years studying these animals as a neighborhood and can identify dozens of them on sight. They've managed to document their natural feeding habits, their hunting strategies, the tidal states in which they're most likely to strike (high tide, at least in the Farrallones) and their behavior around other sharks. They've learned that their vision is probably better than we give them credit for and that while they don't swim in pods, they do seem to stay in loose aggregations.

The Devil's Teeth has some big flaws, though. First, for all that Pyle and Anderson have learned, very little of it has made its way into the book. The information listed above is pretty much the sum total. Even then we're usually just told that they've learned something, not what they've learned. This lack of information does a great disservice to Pyle and Anderson. Without the results of their research to back them up, when we see them running down a hill at breakneck speed to launch a boat and witness a seal attack, or squaring off with a shark-cage diving operator that wants to observe the sharks as well, or just competing against each other to see who'll be the first to surf in the sharky waters, they come off as adrenalin junkies who don't want to let anyone else in on the fun. This isn't the case, of course. At least I don't think it is.

The second problem is that the most interesting character in the book, an urchin diver named Ron Elliot who regularly scours the bottom here for urchins while massive great whites circle around, plays a minor role at best. We're told little of how he's managed to stay alive beyond his having some vague sense that a shark is nearby or that it means business. Sorry, that's just not enough.

These weaknesses notwithstanding, The Devil's Teeth is an interesting read, particularly if you're into adventure in desolate places. I recommend it, provided you don't expect to learn anything earth-shaking about the sharks.

The Devil's Teeth was published in 2005 by Henry Holt & Company.

Jerry Shine