A bitter divorce becomes the final straw in Andrew Kincaid's already troubled life. With his wife and three children gone and his self-esteem in ruins, the forty-one-year-old former sailor burns all his bridges, quits his New York City job, and outfits a thirty-eight-foot yacht for a daring solo voyage.

Once on his boat, the Picaroon, he spurns the easy route through the Panama Canal, and instead, chooses a hazardous westward rounding of the infamous Cape Horn, then a trans-Pacific passage to Sydney, Australia, via Darwin's Galapagos, and the islands of French Polynesia. Mountainous seas, hidden shoals, and dangerous coral reefs challenge Kincaid's sailing and navigation skills on his 20,000-mile odyssey.

However, a single shore leave in South America changes his life in ways he could never have imagined. There he meets the boisterous and hot-tempered ex-pat Australian, Kate Devonshire, a fugitive running from a dark past; the two begin a sexually charged romance in Rio de Janeiro. Eventually, Kincaid travels deep into the parched barrens of the Queensland outback to the scene of a psychopathic rampage that shocked a nation.

AUTHOR BIO
William Efford was born in Montreal, Quebec. A former recreational yachtsman, he has cruised in the Great Lakes and traveled widely in the United States. He lives with his wife in Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada, where he writes fiction.

Devastated after the drowning death of his wife, Suzanne, fifty-year-old Howard Munro resigns his tenure as head of the English department at St. Martin's College in Toledo, Ohio. Hoping to make a fresh start in his life and with a new job waiting for him in southern California, he strikes out for San Diego in his motor home. En route, he picks up a rain-soaked hitchhiker, Miriam Kovacs, a down-on-her-luck unemployed waitress thumbing her way west. Culturally and socially the two travelers are a study in opposites: the successful, well-educated, and pro-life Munro; and Kovacs, a marginalized high school dropout with a long history of menial jobs and failed relationships-a woman intent on terminating her unwanted pregnancy. Yet despite the differences that divide them, their journey across America will unite them in an unexpected meeting of hearts and minds. The woman provides Munro with the first female companionship since the passing of his wife. The professor gives Kovacs-an unsophisticated woman who has rarely ventured beyond her Philadelphia home-her first glimpse of new horizons and new values. In the process, both people will be changed forever.

A bitter divorce becomes the final straw in Andrew Kincaid's already troubled life. With his wife and three children gone and his self-esteem in ruins, the forty-one-year-old former sailor burns all his bridges, quits his New York City job, and outfits a thirty-eight-foot yacht for a daring solo voyage.

Once on his boat, the Picaroon, he spurns the easy route through the Panama Canal, and instead, chooses a hazardous westward rounding of the infamous Cape Horn, then a trans-Pacific passage to Sydney, Australia, via Darwin's Galapagos, and the islands of French Polynesia. Mountainous seas, hidden shoals, and dangerous coral reefs challenge Kincaid's sailing and navigation skills on his 20,000-mile odyssey.

However, a single shore leave in South America changes his life in ways he could never have imagined. There he meets the boisterous and hot-tempered ex-pat Australian, Kate Devonshire, a fugitive running from a dark past; the two begin a sexually charged romance in Rio de Janeiro. Eventually, Kincaid travels deep into the parched barrens of the Queensland outback to the scene of a psychopathic rampage that shocked a nation.

AUTHOR BIO
William Efford was born in Montreal, Quebec. A former recreational yachtsman, he has cruised in the Great Lakes and traveled widely in the United States. He lives with his wife in Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada, where he writes fiction.