Total Loss (Circle of Tides — Book 2)

A billionaire developer dead inside a hermetically dead-bolted yacht cabin. A twenty-million-dollar maritime policy. And an acoustic frequency that shouldn't exist outside classified Navy archives.

July 1995. When real estate titan Richard Colson is found dead inside the main salon of his custom sixty-foot sloop, Colson-Glory, anchored in the Sarasota Mooring Field, every hatch is mechanically dead-bolted from the inside. Local authorities and Gulf Maritime Assurance underwriters are eager to rule it a suicide and fast-track a twenty-million-dollar settlement for Colson's poised widow, Cassandra.

Brought aboard by Lloyd's adjuster Beverly Burns, forensic marine auditor Ray Spooner ignores the blood spatter and inspects the stainless-steel standing rigging. Under his jeweler's loupe, the turnbuckles and companionway brass reveal microscopic harmonic chatter marks—physical proof that an external piezoelectric transducer used structural resonance to walk the deadbolt shut from across the water.

Worse, the harmonic dampening equations used to turn the yacht's hull into an acoustic tuning fork were lifted directly from a classified 1981 Navy salvage study co-authored by Ray and his dead mentor, Leo McAniff.

Tracking the conspiracy from narcissistic yacht designer Arthur Gable's Snead Island studio to a booby-trapped stilt house off Midnight Pass, Ray and Artie Whittaker uncover a systemic three-percent underwriting kickback ring—and come face-to-face with a living ghost transmitting on a 14.2-kilohertz Navy handshake frequency.

**TOTAL LOSS is the gripping second installment in the Circle of Tides Suncoast noir mystery series—where cold physics meets high-finance murder.**

Instant Digital Delivery Package - **DRM-Free EPUB Edition (`AHS-BOOK-COT-02.epub`)**: Compatible with Apple Books, Kindle, Kobo, and all standard e-readers. - **Typeset 6×9 Print-Edition PDF (`AHS-BOOK-COT-02-print.pdf`)**: Full 464-page collector's interior layout (167,552 words, 28 chapters). - **Forensic Case File & Reader Dossier (`AHS-BOOK-COT-02-dossier.md`)**: Series chronology, 1995 Suncoast setting coordinates, and technical forensic notes.