Seize the Storm

Seventeen-year-old Susannah, her parents, her cousin, and a crew member, voyaging to Hawaii aboard Athena's Secret, sail into a deadly confrontation with professional criminals. Cadnum meticulously limns each character's personality and motives, embedding them in an expertly constructed web of intrigue. Themes of fortune, greed, fate, and the certainty of death play out in a thrilling examination of "life's tough truths."

As seventeen-year-old Susannah, her parents, her cousin Martin, and crew member Axel voyage to Hawaii aboard Athena's Secret, little do they know they are sailing into a deadly confrontation with professional criminals. From a plane above, Jeremy, son of a drug lord, and hired guns Elwood and Shako seek a drifting ghost ship and missing money from the illegal sale of machine guns and rocket launchers. The meeting of pleasure cruisers and outlaws seems fated, an idea suggested by the name of the yacht and her shelves full of Patrick O'Brian novels and Greek myth collections. Cadnum meticulously limns each character's personality and motives, embedding them in an expertly constructed web of intrigue. The straightforward prose attains elegance at times: Axel is described as "simple the way a thumb is simple"; the yacht gets tangled up in a huge wad of fishing like "a giant, diaphanous amoeba that spun out tendrils." And when the wrong people find the cash, greed operates upon them "like the gravity that made planets go in orbit around the sun." Lines such as these help place this drama of little people bobbing on the ocean's surface into a grander morality play in which big themes of fortune, greed, fate, and the certainty of death play out in a thrilling examination of "life's tough truths." dean schneider