The Mayday : A Jack Merchant and Sarah Ballard Novel (Jack Merchant & Sarah Ballard Novels)

Rating:
Summary: Merchant and Ballard capture the imagination
Review: Eidson's second seagoing thriller featuring ex-DEA agent Jack Merchant and his skittish lover, Sarah Ballard, owner of a boat repo business, centers on Jack's hunt for two missing children, lost at sea and presumed dead. By everyone, that is, except their father, who pleads his case to Jack, then promptly takes a header out a fourth-floor window and spends the rest of the story in a coma.

Merchant is doing some repairs on the sailboat he calls home in Boston Harbor when Matt Coulter arrives with his outlandish story. His boat foundered off the coast of Rhode Island, he says, and an apparent rescuer scooped up his two kids and left Matt and his wife for dead. He attributes the big gaps in his story to the blow to the head he took before the Coast Guard picked him up along with the body of his wife. The children were never found. Matt wants Jack to find that phantom rescue boat.

Out of pity, Jack agrees to spend a few days searching for the boat. The cops and Matt's friends think Jack is a sleaze for taking the man's money, especially after Matt's apparent suicide attempt, but initial research turns up a promising lead, and then another murder and soon Jack and Sarah are both in the sights of a ruthless sociopath.

Point of view switches from Jack and Sarah to the villains and semi-villains and, in a refreshing twist, the mastermind's pathology makes him as bungling as he is dangerous. This does not, however, make Jack's task any easier and the conclusion is a breathless, deadly, struggle on the high seas. Edgy and well-structured.

Rating:
Summary: A real page-turner
Review: Take this book with you on vacation. You'll blow through it in two sittings, then feel compelled to pass it along.
Mayday has action, adventure, romance, and best of all for the sailors among us, it's written by a guy who understands boats and nautical terms, which gives it more credibility.
David Liscio, Nahant, MA
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