Product Description

Julie Tanaka lives on a sailboat in the Caribbean with her husband Hideo. He is away, delivering a sailboat to California and her daughter Meiko is visiting during a break in her college education. They are playing in their dinghy, zooming as fast as they can off the western coast of Trinidad, when they discover a body floating in the water. They hurry back to the marina, only to find the police waiting. However they are not there for the dead man, instead they inform Julie that her husband has been killed along with two known drug smugglers when the boat he was delivering blew up off the California coast.

Before the women get a chance to digest this tragic information, DEA agent Bill Broxton shows up at their boat wanting to question Julie about her Japanese American husband. Julie is furious, sends him away. The police come back, then an attorney representing TYS, Trinidad Yacht Services shows up with papers that say the women have to leave the boat, as it's been confiscated because of debts owed the shipyard. Julie knows the papers are false, so she and Meiko sneak the boat out of the country.

TYS is owned by German crooks who are in cahoots with the Salizar drug cartel. One of the ways they get their illegal goods into the United States is by hiding them on expensive yachts bound for Florida, but with Hideo dead and his wife and daughter not knowing about the drugs and having fled, they have no choice but to send a crew after them to try and get their cocaine back. However, they have an ace in the hole, because Julie and Meiko have taken Victor Drake aboard to help them get the boat away. Victor works for the Salizars, but he wants Meiko, so he does his best to sabatoge the boat.

Broxton teams up with T-Bone Powers, a likable pirate, but a drug smuggler himself, and they go after the women to try and save the damsels in distress before the drug smugglers catch them.

Meanwhile as the smugglers close on the women, Hurricane Darlene is speeding her way across the Atlantic. Bad guys behind, a hurricane in front, a saboteur on board and our heroines not very experienced sailors, but they learn fast as the skies darken and their options run out.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #787789 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Released on: 2005-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 340 pages

From the Publisher
From the Publisher

If it's the time of the year when Hurricanes blow you can usually find Jack at a sailor's bar in either Grenada or Trinidad, during the other half of the year he lives at anchor in the French West Indies, usually Martinique or the Saints, or maybe St. Martin. So when he writes about Caribbean Hurricanes, sailboats or the Caribbean Sea, he's writing from experience and it shows.

In Hurricane, Mr. Stewart has written 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 Jack Stewart. I live on a sailboat in the Caribbean. I'm what they call a single-hander, an odd ball, a guy that sails alone. It's not that I don't like women, I do. I just like a different one in every port. Wait! does that sound sexist, I didn't mean it to sound that way. It's just that I was married to the finest woman that ever lived for twenty-three years. She's gone now, cancer. I could never deal with all that pain again, so now all my relationships are like ships passing in the night.

I didn't start writing till the love of my life passed. It seems like all of a sudden I had an urge to entertain, you know to take my mind and the mind of others off the daily grind of ordinary living. I'm no Hemingway, no Mailer. I don't write because I've got something important to say, or to educate, or to influence. I write to entertain, only to entertain. It's enough. And if I help a person here or there to escape his pain or sorrow, or even if I just help someone wile away a boring afternoon, I'll feel like I've done my job.

If you like one of my stories, feel free to email me at: jackstewart@bootlegpress.com and let me know. If, on the other hand, you don't, well, e-mail me anyway. I answer all my messages.

Best wishes and fair winds,

Jack Stewart

From the Inside Flap
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

Broxton is Back, Hooray!
Bill Broxton, my favorite DEA agent comes back from his debut in "Scorpion." He's back in the Caribbean and he's unattached again. I thought he was going to live happily ever after with the girl from the last book, but it appears, that like James Bond, he's destined to have a different girl in each book.

In this one Broxton wants to know why Hideo Tanaka washed up on a California beach after a sailboat he was on was recovered full of cocaine. Tanaka lived with his American wife Julie on a sailboat in the Yacht Club in Trinidad. When he goes there to confront Tanaka's wife, he finds Julie onboard with her daughter Meiko, who is visiting on break from medical school. The women tell him, and he believes them, that they knew nothing of Tanaka's drug activities. He leaves, but someone takes a couple shots at him before he can leave the Yacht Club. He gives chase, dispatches the bad guy and in no time finds himself wanted for murder in a country that hangs killers. To make matters worse, Julie and Meiko have fled the country on their boat with very bad drug smugglers chasing after them.

Broxton has no choice but to team up with a likable rouge named T-Bone, who is kind of a drug smuggler himself. T-Bone's sailboat is stuffed full of marijuana that he'd planned on taking from Trinidad up island to St. Martin. So now we have Broxton on a drug boat in hot pursuit of the bad guys, who are chasing the damsels in distress, who are sailing toward St. Martin and did I forget to mention that big bad Hurricane Darlene is headed straight for St. Martin as well.

And there you have a very brief synopsis of a super thriller that had me reading my weekend away. "Hurricane" was a fast read about characters I cared about. The dialogue was crisp, the story believable and the action fast and furious. I felt like I was on those sailboats and I really felt like I was caught up in the middle of that Hurricane.

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. 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

If the Drug Smugglers don't get them, the Hurricane will
Julie Tanaka lives on a sailboat in the Caribbean with her husband Hideo. Hideo is away delivering a boat to California. Her daughter Meiko, on break from medical school is visiting when police come by the marina with the sad news that her husband has been killed in California. Unknown to Julie, Hideo had been delivering a boat load of cocaine to the United States and that plenty of drugs are hidden aboard her boat as well.

Bill Broxton is the DEA agent who is invistigation her husband's death. At first he believes Julie must somehow be in on the drug smuggling, but after meeting her he quickly changes his mind. Someone tries to kill him after he questions Julie and Meiko and all of a sudden Broxton knows that investigating a crime in the Caribbean is a little different than in America. In the Caribbean the criminals aren't the least bit shy about attacking the police and in no time at all Broxton finds himself in a tight frame with the cops after him.

Meanwhile, Julie and Meiko are on the run, sailing from island to island with the drug smugglers always close behind and behind the smugglers, Broxton with a smuggler of his own. Can Broxton and his new found pal, T-Bone Powers, a drug smuggling pirate with an attitude, get to the women in time to save them? And then of course there is the little matter of the Hurricane bearing down on them.

HURRICANE, Jack Stewart's second Caribbean thriller, is chock-a-block full of suspense, terrific sailing scenes, nasty Caribbean weather, nastier Caribbean bad guys and a couple of women in trouble that you'll never forget.

Ms. Mindy Adams