Gripping Mystery Fiction & Off-Grid Solar Hardware.

Insurers happily pay out when ninety-seven percent of a sinking adds up—which means the last three percent is where professionals hide their crimes. When the forty-six-foot sportfisher Sarasota Star vanishes into an offshore karst cavern, forensic marine surveyor Ray Spooner dives a wreck whose vault was burned open from the inside before the hull ever hit bottom.

Real estate developer Richard Colson is found dead inside the main salon of his sixty-foot sloop with every hatch mechanically dead-bolted from the inside. Under a jeweler's loupe, Ray Spooner finds microscopic chatter marks on the companionway brass—proof that someone walked the bolt shut from across the dark water.

A suffocating red tide bloom chokes thirty miles of the Florida Suncoast just in time to trigger $254 million in catastrophe defaults on family-owned beachfront motels. Sampling the dead water, Ray traces synthetic chemical catalysts to an offshore barge—and a custom chromoly trailer hitch machined by his supposedly dead mentor.

Thirty feet beneath the channel floor of Midnight Pass, a commercial cutter-suction dredge jams its teeth into solid Detroit steel: a crushed 1974 Cadillac Eldorado weighted with three thousand pounds of ballast and two bodies sealed inside since 1983.

Patrolling Casey Key at midnight, Ray's daughter Maya finds a dead loggerhead sea turtle carrying a modified titanium transponder bolted to its shell. Tracing the signal exposes a shadow maritime ledger from 1988 that has compounded into a $5.4 million contract on Ray's life.

An encrypted 14.2-kilohertz transmission leads Ray, Maya, and Artie Whittaker twenty-two miles offshore to the true resting place of the 1988 Silver Queen—and a final midnight reckoning with Leo McAniff on a decommissioned Gulf rig in the teeth of a winter gale.