Jaws by Peter Benchley

The boy stopped, and the shark swam below him. Then it turned again. The shark swam up fast. Its mouth opened...
Amity is a quiet town near New York. Nothing happens there.
One night a young woman goes for a swim in the sea. She doesn't come back. The next morning the police find her dead on the beach.
Brody is a good policeman, and he thinks there's a shark near Amity. Young Matt Hooper says it's a Great White shark - the fish they call the 'man-eater'.
Brody tries to close the beaches, but the important people in Amity won't listen to him. Then, on a sunny afternoon, a young boy goes into the sea...
Peter Benchley was born in 1940. In the 1960s he had many different jobs. He worked for the newspaper the Washington Post and for Newsweek magazine. From 1967 to 1969 he worked at the White House for President Johnson. After working in television for three years, he started writing.
He wrote Jaws in 1974. The next year, Steven Spielberg made a very exciting film from the book. The film made Spielberg world-famous. People of all ages went to see the film, and cried out in the cinema because they were so afraid! Peter Benchley helped to write the story for the film, and you can see him in it. He is the man from the newspaper on the beach.
After Jaws, Peter Benchley wrote many more books. The most famous are The Deep (1976) and The Island (1979). He also wrote the films of these books. Twenty years later, he wrote about sharks again - he wrote White Shark in 1994.