Born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York City, Mickey Spillane started writing while at high school. During the Second World War, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a fighter pilot and instructor. After the war, he moved to South Carolina. He was married three times, the third time to Jane Rogers Johnson, and had four children and two stepchildren. He wrote his first novel, I, the Jury (1947), in order to raise the money to buy a house for himself and his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce. The novel sold six and a half million copies in the United States, and introduced Spillane's most famous character, the hardboiled PI Mike Hammer. The many novels that followed became instant bestsellers, until in 1980 the US all-time fiction bestseller list of fifteen titles boasted seven by Mickey Spillane. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. He was uniformly disliked by critics, owing to the high content of sex and violence in his books. However, he was later praised by American mystery writers Max Alan Collins and William L. DeAndrea, as well as artist Markus Lüpertz. The novelist Ayn Rand, a friend of Spillane's, appreciated the black-and-white morality of his books. Spillane was an active Jehovah's Witness. He died in 2006.

Morgan the Raider got his name from the famous pirate of old, as he stands convicted of stealing $40 million. He is good at getting himself out of jail, too; he has already escaped custody once.
Now he is offered the chance of a reduced sentence - but at risk of his life. For he must get into an escape-proof prison on a Caribbean island, a torture fortress known as the Rose Castle, in order to find and set free an important scientist. A CIA agent, Kim Stacy, is assigned the job of accompanying him - and keeping an eye on him at the same time.
But did Morgan really steal the money? And just who are the prisoners being held in the island fortress?