Kling Christine

Years ago Seychelle Sullivan had the chance to save a person's life. But on that summer night in Fort Lauderdale, lost in a world of teenage resentment and loneliness, Seychelle was not able to comprehend any pain but her own. Today Seychelle captains her forty-­six-­foot salvage boat out of Fort Lauderdale's New River. She's seen change sweep through South Florida, and has witnessed friends and lovers come and go. But she's never escaped that one moment when she could have made a difference and didn't. Now each time she rescues a ship in distress, a little hope stirs in her again. On a steamy Florida morning Seychelle is answering a Mayday call launched from a five-­million-­dollar Broward yacht called Top Ten. Racing her fiercest competitor for salvage rights, Seychelle has a personal stake in this rescue: Her former lover, Neal Garrett, is the yacht's hired skipper. But being the first to reach Top Ten will lead Seychelle to a bloody payday. A beautiful woman has been stabbed to death onboard. And Garrett is no where to be found. Even on shore, the pressures are mounting - Seychelle owes money on her boat, and her love life is in shambles. Within twenty-­four hours of finding the dead woman and towing Top Ten out of the surf, Seychelle realizes that she has stepped into a lethal business involving some of South Florida's sleaziest criminals. While the police treat her as the prime suspect, Seychelle begins to unravel a tangled plot centered on a strip club where "all the girls are tens on top.­" Discovering the sordid secrets of the owner of the yacht she rescued and the fate of the man she once loved, Seychelle is connecting human predators with innocent victims, and a mystery on land with a mystery buried deep beneath the sea. Now, to find out what really happened to Neal Garrett, Seychelle must retrace his last steps, through two murders and a horrific crime wave to a final confrontation with someone who may want to kill her...­or be her salvation.­From Publishers WeeklyIn this strong suspense debut, Seychelle Sullivan owns a salvage tug near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and makes a precarious living piloting luxury yachts and sportfishing boats in the Florida waters. When her radio picks up a distress call from the Top Ten, she hurries to the scene, hoping to net a windfall. The luxurious yacht is skippered by her former lover, Neal, who seems to have abandoned ship and left a dead body behind. Who is the dead girl, where is Neal, why do the police suspect Seychelle, and how much can she hope to recover for salvaging the yacht? When she finds her modest cottage has been searched and her stash of emergency money is missing, she figures Neal must be alive, hiding from the police or from the girl's killer. The Top Ten's representative offers a paltry sum to settle the salvage claim, so Seychelle decides to find out who the real owner is and go to arbitration. As the tension and suspense build, Seychelle's existence becomes increasingly precarious. Kling vividly portrays a characteristic dichotomy of the Sunshine State-­native Floridians trying to earn an honest living in an atmosphere where anything and anyone can be tainted by loan sharks, drug money or worse. As a female tugboat captain, Seychelle is one of the genre's more unusual amateur sleuths, and Kling makes her one of its more endearing ones as well.­Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalSalvage boat operator Seychelle Sullivan has a good reason to rush to the rescue of a beleaguered yacht: an old flame is the hired skipper. Complicating matters, though, is the dead body onboard. A much-­touted debut. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Seychelle is proud to follow in her father's footsteps and work the waters on a tugboat. She remembers Florida before it fractured between rich and poor, white and black, Cuban and Haitian. For Seychelle, life is all about making a living, making love, and keeping her eye on the beauty that still remains in an ever-­changing community. Then her life takes a turn when her tug intercepts with a swamped fishing boat in the Gulf Stream. Inside the boat are a murdered woman and a little girl in a white dress. When Seychelle returns to shore with a traumatized Haitian girl named Solange in her cabin, she is faced with the border patrol, the police, and an unraveling love affair. Determined to protect Solange, and somehow keep her from being sent back to Haiti, Seychelle becomes obsessed with the forces that nearly killed the girl -- and left her speechless with terror. All Seychelle knows for sure is that Solange's father was an American . . . and that somehow she slipped through a murderer's hands. Exploring the hidden world of Florida's Haitian community, Seychelle realizes that Solange is still in great danger -- and that one killer has claimed dozens of lives. With a murderer stalking the child, Seychelle is racing to unravel dangerous truths. But to get the answers she needs, she must return to where it all started: in the waters of the Gulf Stream, where people died for a hope and prayer -- and a man with a machete did the work of the devil himself.

Sex and adventure meet history and intrigue in this breathless nautical thriller that spans decades to imagine a fascinating answer to the real-­life mystery of the vanished French sub, Surcouf. When Maggie Riley sets sail for the Caribbean, all she wants is a little R&R before starting a work assignment in Dominica. The last thing Maggie expects is to rescue Cole Thatcher, a sexy—but possibly nuts—conspiracy-­spouting archaeologist found swimming nude off the island of Guadeloupe. It turns out Cole is searching for the wreckage of a vanished World War II submarine, claiming it holds millions in gold coins and classified documents from a powerful inner circle of the secret society Skull and Bones. Maggie has enough skeletons to deal with. But when she learns her own past may intersect this inner circle of Bonesmen, she realizes Cole might not be so crazy after all—and joining him in the search for the sub may be her only course to uncover a hidden truth.­**