Product Description

Julie Tanaka's husband takes a job for a boatyard in Trinidad, delivering a yacht to California. The boat goes down, his body is washed up on the beach with pounds of cocaine and the DEA sends Bill Broxton to investigate. Julie is in Trinidad, living on board her own boat, when a process server representing the boatyard confronts her. They want to seize her sixty-foot sailboat for bills her husband had supposedly not paid, but she doesn't believe them and sneaks the boat out of the country. Unknown to Julie, the owner of the boatyard has secreted hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine and cash in Julie's boat, fiberglassing it into the hull and between the bulkheads. He wants the boat back with Julie dead and the only thing standing in his way is Bill Broxton.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #423200 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 340 pages

From the Publisher
Hurricane is a thriller about two women in trouble. They are not experienced sailors, but circumstances have them at sea, fleeing from drug smugglers as they race toward St. Martin while Hurricane Darlene charges across the Atlantic, blowing in the same direction. You can almost hear the thrashing sea, feel the sting of the howling wind, see the darkening sky as your fingers burn through the pages.

Hurricane is a thriller of the first order and we believe if you give it a chance, you'll enjoy it, however you'll probably miss a night's sleep. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Sincerely,

Bootleg Press

From the Author
My name is Ken Douglas and I've killed Jack Stewart. It was hard, he was a nice guy, but he had to go.

When HURRICANE first came out, I had a problem. I'd lived several years on a sailboat in the Caribbean, writing away. Too many books, it turns out to be released at onetime under my own name. So I invented Jack Stewart.

Jack is a character in on of my stories, still unpublished, but someday. The photo I used on line was of my good friend Dick Macpartland, who passed away at a very young fifty-four. Dick was a smuggler, pirate, real shoot 'em up outlaw, who smoked too many Camels. Using his photo was a way for me to kind of keep him around.

Now it's been a couple three years and some of my readers have figured it out, that Jack and I are one and the same, so sadly, I've changed the cover, changed the name on the book and killed of Jack Stewart. I'll miss him.

I hope you like HURRICANE,

Ken Douglas

From the Back Cover
Julie Tanaka's husband takes a job for a boatyard in Trinidad, delivering a yacht to California. The boat goes down, his body is washed up on the beach with pounds of cocaine and the DEA sends Bill Broxton to investigate.

Julie is in Trinidad, living on board her own boat, when a process server representing the boatyard confronts her. They want to seize her sixty-foot sailboat for bills her husband had supposedly not paid, but she doesn't believe them and sneaks the boat out of the country.

Unknown to Julie, the owner of the boatyard has secreted hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine and cash in Julie's boat, fiberglassing it into the hull and between the bulkheads. He wants the boat back with Julie dead and the only thing standing in his way is Bill Broxton.

Customer Reviews

Fast-Paced, Action-Packed Sailing Adventure
DEA agent Bill Broxton is in Trinidad, investigating the mysterious explosion onboard a sailboat off the coast of California. The boat sank and the skipper, Hideo Tanaka, went down with the ship, however mucho cocaine was discovered so the DEA is interested. Broxton goes back to the Caribbean, where the boat set sail from and confronts the skipper's wife and daughter, Julie and Meiko Tanaka.

Julie Tanaka lives aboard a sailboat in the yacht club in Trinidad, her daughter is visiting on a break from medical school. They are clueless about the drugs and angry at Broxton for even bringing it up, right on the heels of them learning about their tragic loss. To make matters worse for the women, a local shipyard wants to confiscate their sailboat home, because they say Hideo was in debt to them for boat repairs. Julie doesn't believe this and besides, she wouldn't give up her boat anyway, so in the middle of the night the women leave Trinidad.

However, what the women don't know is that when the boat was in the shipyard, where Hideo supposedly accumulated those bills, some bad guys hid a lot of cocaine aboard. Was Hideo in on the dastardly cocaine hiding? Did he know about the cocaine that was hidden on the boat he died on? Or was he an unknowing dupe? These are questions Broxton wants answered, but the women flee the country before he can learn the truth.

And he has problems of his own. The drug smugglers have framed him for murder and he has to go into hiding. The bad guys are after him, the local cops too. Eventually he teams up with a marijuana smuggler named T-Bone, which is a bit ironic, and together they take off after the damsels in distress. And the women are in distress, as the evil, drug smuggling killers are after them.

Okay. there you have the beginning of this super thriller. I really liked the Julie and Meiko characters and Broxton is well written too, but what really made the book for me was the action-packed scenes that take place onboard a couple sailboats as they head toward that Hurricane. Oh yes, I forgot to mention the Hurricane. Well, I'm mentioning it now. You know the characters, good and bad, are in for some serious trouble. All you have to do is look at the cover and you'd know that.

Bad Guys Closing in and a Hurricane on the Way!
Julie Tanaka is a blue-eyed blond who takes quick offense to DEA Bill Broxton right off the bat when he comes to the sailboat she lives on in the Trinidad and Tobago Yacht Club in the Caribbean. "What," she says to him, when he is surprised at her appearance, "you were expecting someone a little more Japanese?" However her ire is quickly turned to grief when Broxton tells her that her husband has been found dead in the water off the coast of California and that the sailboat he had been hired to deliver was a drug boat.

Julie is saddened, stunned and thrown into a state of confusion, as is her daughter Meiko, who has been visiting on a break from Medical School in California. Then a weasel, lawyer type shows up at their boat and tells Julie that it's been confiscated under Trinidadian law, because of bills that her husband hadn't paid. She has only a short time to get her stuff off the boat that is her home and to presumedly leave the country.

And she does leave the country. She and Meiko sneak their boat out in the middle of the night. However, the women don't really know how to sail. They had been living in the Yacht Club, tied to a slip, for the last couple of years, refitting and making the boat ready to go on a round the world cruise that never seemed to happen. And to make matters just a little worse for Julie and Meiko, a no goodnik, who has designs on Meiko, offers to help them sail the boat out of the country.

But unknown to Julie, she has been the victim of evil drug smugglers who happen to own a shipyard. These no good rats have stuffed her boat full of cocaine and cash and had planned on Julie and her husband sailing it unsuspected into the States, where they would retrieve their money and drugs. But once her husband was gone, they reacted quickly, trying to get her boat by legal means. So they are pretty doggone upset when she runs away. However, also unknown to Julie and Meiko, the guy helping them is part of the drug dealing cartel.

So with a spy on board and bad drug smugglers in hot pursuit, these two women, who don't know a bowline from a lasso, have to not only learn to sail like the wind, but they have to do it very, very fast, because there is trouble up ahead and it's blowing their way at about a hundred miles an hour.

This book is a real grabber and a fun read. Mr. Douglas (this book was originally released under the pseudonym Jack Stewart) writes a good sailboat story, moreover he writes about hurricanes like he has actually been there. I know he made me feel as if I were living through one. I felt the wind, heard it howl. I saw the churning seas, the bending trees, the destruction, the terror, the relief when it was over.

And, of course, I'm a sucker for the kind of story with a strong heroine, so when you throw in a sailboat and a lot of action, you have everything I need in a story. Five stars from Captain Katie.

Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

Lots of Action, Tension too
Joey Tanaka is in Trinidad, living aboard a sailboat in the marina there, when she gets word her husband has been lost at sea. The DEA believes he was smuggling drugs into the United States, but Joey knows better, her husband would never have done that. However, she has some problems to deal with, her husband had been the sailor in the family, this lifestyle is new to her and though she likes the people in the sailing community, she doesn't really know how to operate or maintain a big sailboat.

To make matters worse, she finds out her husband supposedly owed way more money than she has to a boatyard for repairs. She believes the boatyard people are lying about the bills so they can get her boat. She's in a foreign country, subject to their laws. She doesn't know what to do.

And to further add to her to her woes, American DEA agent Bill Broxton pays a call, telling her he believes her husband was involved in the drug trade. She has to get out of the country, so with her step-daughter Meiko, they sail out of the country after dark. This upsets the people from the boatyard, not because her husband owed her money, but because they hid lots of drugs on her boat, hoping to get them back when she and her husband unwittingly sailed back to America with the drugs onboard. They want their drugs back, so they take off after Joey.

Bill Broxton isn't giving up either. He partners with a smuggler and takes off after the bad guys, who are after Joey and Meiko. The question here is will the bad guys, and they're very bad, catch up to the women before the DEA guy catches up to the bad guys. Oh, and I forgot to mention, there is a Hurricane on the way and everybody is sailing right into it.

There's lots of action in this book, tension too, characters I believed in and a story that kept me burning the midnight oil as I sped through the pages. I couldn't put this one down.