Dead Reckoning

The book opens on the Maine coast just after a rendezvous between Nate Belden (recently retired at fifty) with his fiancée Laura Wells and Bill and Jennifer Martin. But as the reader already knows, the Martins have been horribly murdered and their yacht scuttled. Unable to accept their disappearance as an accident, Nate is compelled to delve into the mystery. The reader, sitting on Nate’s shoulder for the remainder of the book, is in for a twisting nautical quest.

In New York City they enlist the help of Nate’s best friend as well as a tough private investigator, as a series of suspicious deaths and near accidents points to John Blakemore, a wealthy Boston businessman who is linked to the victims by a web of threat, fear and violence. Blakemore seems desperately afraid of something out of his past, a tangle of secrets which stems back to World War II, and pivots around a huge treasure find in the Bahamas during the mid-1952s.

After direct threats to Nate and Laura they hasten to sail out of harm’s way, but a nearly fatal attack by the villain’s henchmen forces a total re-evaluation of their lives. With Laura now hiding in England, Nate’s undercover investigation takes him through several stops in Florida leading up to a grotesque double killing in the Keys. Driven by outrage, revenge and fear for his life, Nate enlists the original victim’s estranged daughter who is experienced beyond her years and spectacularly beautiful. The course of the struggle reverses in Key West as together they ensnare two psychopathic henchmen from whom Nate harshly extracts a pivotal piece of the mystery, and after an excruciating ordeal on the wastelands of the Bahama Banks he sinks to the level of his adversaries. Then, utterly disillusioned and demoralized, his values adrift, Nate finds resurrection in a highly sexual encounter with his extraordinary young accomplice during a week in South Miami Beach.

With several critical elements of the mystery still eluding him, Nate travels to Washington to find critical information linking Blakemore’s WWII naval unit with a clandestine wartime movement of gold specie. Pursuing his last hope, Nate travels back to Maine to find the linchpin of the puzzle, revealing a terrible act of murder, treason and greed.

Seeking justice and moral victory rather than mere revenge, Nate confronts Blakemore in person and thereby commits a near-fatal error. The action climaxes with the lives of Nate, Laura and his closest friends in dire peril. Seconds away from being shot dead they are saved when an earlier subplot folds back onto the main story and another arch-villain is surprisingly revealed.

As a thriller, Dead Reckoning rides its intriguing plot at a brisk pave. But it offers the reader much more. Entwined in his plight, party to his thoughts, the reader develops an affinity for Nate Belden. When he loses his own moral battle we feel his pain. When he finds hope again in the arms of a younger woman most of us will forgive his infidelity; we will understand his instinct for self-preservation. Meanwhile the reader is pulled along with the action to exciting seaside locals from Maine to Key West, gaining exposure to a life he or she perhaps never imagined--the life of the live-aboard cruiser.

Bob Brewer was born June 7, 1943 and raised in the New York City area. He attended Williams College and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. At the age of forty-eight, he ended twenty-five years in the institutional investment management business, bought a fifty-foot sailboat, and set off cruising with his second wife, Lee, to whom he has now been married fourteen years.

Over the next four years, Bob, Lee, and their flat-coated retriever, Chelsea, ventured from Maine as far as Venezuela, including the Caribbean, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the east coast of the United States, covering over 20,000 miles. Nearly all of the locales described in his book Dead Reckoning are based on first-hand experience. The first draft of Dead Reckoning was written on a laptop computer aboard their boat during their cruising adventure.

Bob and Lee and Chelsea split their time between Bluffton, South Carolina in the winter and Sagaponack, New York in summer.

Bob has been sailing since the age of eight.