Overview
The Ft. Lauderdale-to-Bermuda race is one of the most important in the world of yacht racing, and Robert Cramm, scion of an old family of Newport yacht builders, is determined to win it with Siren, a gleaming new boat with a very controversial, possibly dangerous design. His partner is to be his wife, Cheryl, but on the eve of the race, she is unexpectedly called home to take care of their small daughter, who has fallen ill. Replacing his wife with Beth, his attractive assistant with whom he has been rumored to be having an affair, Cramm sets off for glory. Days later, in the early predawn hours, Siren disappears from radar screens in a mysterious explosion. Burned remnants of the yacht, as well as Beth's body, are found by rescue workers - and Beth is discovered to have been three months pregnant. There is no trace of Robert Cramm's corpse. Late one evening at their Newport mansion, Cheryl Cramm is struggling with her grief when the telephone rings. She watches as her little daughter races to answer it and is stunned when the child begins to hum a lullaby she'd only sung with her father. Then the line goes dead. Is Robert Cramm really dead? Or is someone trying to push Cheryl over the edge in order to take control of the Cramm fortune? When Cheryl discovers that the family company is virtually bankrupt, she must confront the devastating possibility that the accident was an elaborate hoax. Is she to become her husband's next victim?Editorials
Kirkus Reviews
After his well-received lifeboat saga Dark Tide (1994), whoduniteer Kennedy offers another salty tale of yachting mayhem and misadventure, this time set mostly on land, in Bermuda and around the office of a New England hi-tech boutique yachtmaker.Romantically rugged Robert Cramm's boatbuilding business is on the skids, and, even if winning a prestigious Bermuda yacht race won't save the company from short orders and leaky finances, Cramm just has to accept the challenge. His newest yacht, Siren, sporting a risky top-heavy hull, was designed by brooding genius Sean Patton, whose previous competition-boat sank ingloriously. Cramm's best friend and partner, George Williamson, wants to sell the business to a souless, but successful, competitor, Vector, owned by the shadowy Philip McKnight. Meanwhile, Cramm's wife, Cheryl, is all set to crew with her husband on the most important race of his life when their precocious child, Rachel, falls sick. Cheryl gets a flash of separation-anxiety and bows out of the race, leaving Beth Hardway, Cramm's alleged mistress and a reasonably good sailor (even if she did accidentally kill one of her crew in an earlier race) to fill Cheryl's Top-Siders. But Siren never reaches the finish line: Some shattered wreckage and Beth's charred, three- months pregnant corpse are fished out of the Bermuda Triangle. Later, Cheryl gets a creepy phone call hinting that her husband may have faked his death; the family's au pair acts weird; and then this potboiler version of Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach swiftly runs aground. Woman-in-peril plot tricks abound as Cheryl, whose anxieties are passed off as the result of too many secretly drugged drinks, mistakes good guy Sean Patton for the villain, frets about her daughter, and conveniently blunders into a Fiberglas-crunching finish.
A briskly told, somewhat placeless Clue-game melodrama with nautical flourishes and a few Crichtonesque fun facts about the boatbuilding biz.