Order from Amazon:
ISBN 0-425-13749-X
It’s October, and Kate’s sometime boss and long-distance lover Jack Morgan hires her to investigate the strange disappearance of two crew members on a fishing boat working out of Dutch Harbor. Unfortunately, this means she has to take one of the vacant deckhand positions, and solving a double homicide on a 100-foot crabber in the middle of the Bering Sea is not Kate’s idea of a good time.
People always ask me if I’ve been this seasick. Yes, I have, and I don’t care to discuss it, thank you.
About the Dedication
for Kathleen, Susan and Amy
co-writers in residence
and for Nancy, the angel at the gate
The first and best thing my writing ever earned me was a residency at Hedgebrook Farm, a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island in Washington State and heaven on this earth. There be magick there.
Nancy Skinner Nordhoff is Hedgebrook’s founder, the angel at the gate. Kathleen Alcala, Amy Pence and Susan Simpson Brown were the other writers in residence with me. Kathleen’s son Ben was also there; he was born a month later.
Audio Excerpt
Hear an audio excerpt from this book at Odeo.com.
Book Excerpt
The Avilda rolled into a trench of opaque green seas. When she was vertical, those seas rose as high as her masthead. Now the crabber was listing so steeply that the portside railing was awash. Kate, her legs braced against the slant of the deck, had her head and shoulders jammed up against the frame of an empty crab pot. The pot was threatening to slide over her and the port rail in that order, and her arms were wide-spread, her fingers, numbed with cold and wet with salt water, clutched desperately to the frame of the pot. The wire mesh pressed into the flesh of her face. Something warm and liquid slid down her cheek. She wondered, without a great deal of interest, if it was tears or blood.
The pot was seven feet tall and seven feet wide and three feet deep, a steel frame covered in metal netting, 750 pounds of dead weight empty. Kate was five feet tall, weighed just over 120 pounds and was mere flesh and bone, but she had Newton on her side, and she waited. She could feel the rest of the crew watching, but she was fiercely determined to do this herself, without help, and more importantly, without asking for help.
A muscle in her back rebelled at the unaccustomed strain and spasmed. She cursed beneath her breath, though if she’d shouted her voice would not have been heard above the crash of Aleutian water on deck, the howl of Aleutian winds overhead and the rough, deep-throated roar of the engine beating up through the soles of her feet.
At last, at last, the crabber mounted the next swell and began its inevitable slide in the opposite direction. Groaning in every sheet of plate steel, her submerged hull began to roll, and in one smooth, inexorable shift swung through the perpendicular. The killing pressure of the pot on Kate’s shoulders eased. “For every action,” she muttered, as her feet pushed against the slippery deck, “there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every action, there is–”
The Avilda began her inevitable heel to starboard. With an involuntary sound, half-grunt, half-howl, in cacophonous harmony with the shriek of the straining ship, Kate shoved with all her strength. The pot shuddered, moved a fraction of an inch, another, gave a sudden, stuttering lurch and began to slide. Kate, almost running to keep pace, shoved and slid and cursed her way behind it and across the deck, to fetch up against the opposite railing with a solid thump.
Behind her she heard Andy Pence give a whoop and a shout of approval mixed with amazement, and she thought she heard Seth Skinner swear in a tone distinctly admiring, but she was busy catching her breath, and besides, it was a point of honor not to acknowledge that she had done anything out of the ordinary.