Ghosting

Dr. Jack Scales, a prominent neurosurgeon, is at the peak of his career. To celebrate, he decides to make up for lost time and buys a sailing yacht christened Slow Dance, for a family cruise to Bermuda. But the family is strained: Jack’s wife Arlen is secretly considering leaving the marriage; Rick, their bipolar twenty-year-old son, may need to be committed to a group home; Haley, a rebellious teenager, would rather be anywhere but trapped on a boat with her family; and Jack himself is not prepared for the challenge of the open sea.

Day by day, the Scales face mounting dangers. A lightning storm nearly destroys the boat, Rick’s unstable condition worsens, and both Arlen and Haley realize that Jack is in over his head. Still, emerging from the storm, they find a fragile unity…until a man adrift on a raft leads them into danger against a terrifying gang of smugglers, who will stop at nothing to gain control of Slow Dance.

Filled with an expert seaman’s knowledge and driven by conflicted characters, Ghosting is a new direction for an established author: a thrilling adventure as unpredictable as the sea itself.

Publishers Weekly

Successful neurosurgeon Jack Scales, self-centered and oblivious, sets out with his reluctant wife, teenage daughter, and college-age son on what's intended to be a triumphant cruise aboard his motorized sailboat, Slow Dance, from Long Island to Bermuda in this trite story of outrage and punishment from Poyer (The Crisis). The overconfident, inexperienced sailor shrugs off advice, unaware that his wife loves another man or how unprepared he is for the realities of the sea. A lethal accident is only the first calamity to disrupt the voyage; Slow Dance later nearly sinks in bad weather. When a moment of misguided charity leaves the Scaleses in the hands of a gang of bloodthirsty pirates, the family's survival depends on Jack's limited cunning. Poyer relies on graphic scenes of violence, murder, and rape as well as on moral clichés familiar from action movies, even providing closure with a comforting final moral that contradicts all he has shown us. (Nov.)

DAVID POYER’s thirty-year career included service in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, Pacific, the Pentagon, and the Mideast. He has written eighteen Navy and sea novels, as well as sailing and nautical articles for Chesapeake Bay Magazine, Southern Boating, Shipmate, Tidewater Virginian and other periodicals. His work is required reading in the Literature of the Sea course at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, along with that of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. He lives on Virginia’s Eastern Shore with his wife and their daughter, with whom he explores the Bay and Atlantic coast in their sloop, Water Spirit.