BURIED AT SEA is my third sea story, and as I complete my fourth I continue to be thrilled by the possibilities the oceans present to a suspense novel writer. The sea is the last place on this globalized, homogenized, technology-ridden planet where you can find yourself truly alone against the elements—and often too far away to call for help. In the case of BURIED AT SEA, I raised the ante by giving the hero— a novice sailor—an unstable paranoiac as a captain.

Transatlantic a few years ago on a forty-nine foot centerboard  sloop that rolled like a bathtub, it dawned on me that the guy who owned—and was driving— the sailboat was possibly a dangerous  lunatic. What if I was the only crew and it was just him and me, and I didn't know the first thing about sailing? What would happen if he decided to step overboard one night? Or changed course for some strange part of the world?

Later, while researching submarines and tugboats in the Port of New York for RED SKY AT MORNING, I noticed a dedicated spinning instructor at the Chelsea Piers Sports Club—a hard-working guy who took very seriously his job of helping people. Which made me ask, what if  the spinning instructor was the novice sailor trapped alone on the boat with the lunatic?  

And what if the lunatic had an agenda? Which reminded me of a private investment banker buddy of mine whose primary assets were a silver tongue and a five-thousand dollar suit. He often ran his deals in Hong Kong, which is a great town to buy a used yacht in (and where my "lunatic" Will Spark picked up his.)

A remote and lawless setting suited the chase plot forming in my mind. The South Atlantic Ocean offers a vast and largely empty sea between dangerous Africa and volatile South America. Long stretches of the African Coast are ruled by powerful oil companies answerable to no one but absent stockholders, while on shore in Brazil and Argentina are dark slums the police haven't patrolled in years.  And if that enormous ocean got too hot for my hero, there was always Antarctica down at the bottom.

But I needed a human villain. I wanted to write about how ordinary people survive extraordinary challenges: the danger of the high seas, and powerful ruthless people who stop at nothing to get what they want.  I rejected drug dealers, mafiosa and Russian gangsters—though they in particular tempted me.(Someone's got to write a great suspense novel about how they almost took over Russia).  I wanted somebody scarier—the respectable wolf in sheep's clothing, a thug in bespoke suits whose old boy connections to governments and corporations make him unstoppable—truly outside and above the law. And once I started writing, I learned that he had an even more dangerous daughter.  She, of course, was an expert sailor who had raced high-tech catamarans in the Southern Ocean. So the chase begins.....