Currents Deep and Deadly

Book excerpt: In her travel log of murder, romance, and a personal journey of discovery aboard a cruise ship, Darcy Farthing manages to entertain the reader with her descriptions of Caribbean and South American ports, while also detailing the horrific and wondrous events that take place during her four week adventure. A pragmatic scientist by nature, she says she has given up all belief in a spiritual component to life and knows that coincidences are either man-made or chance occurrences that seem related but have no significance. That is, until a series of unbelievable coincidences challenges her belief. . In telling her story, she lays bare her nonexistent soul and the deeply hidden emotions she has kept in a fragile prison of cold logic and denial for 20 years. She is a savvy, professional woman who has been fighting her internal demons ever since she made a colossal mistake in her personal life from which she knows she can never recover. But on a hastily planned cruise with Dr. Peter Johnson, her latest romantic interest, Darcys non-belief system is shaken when she is confronted with a set of bewildering and frankly unbelievable coincidences that bring together a tangle of strangers, and people and events from her own past. She simply cannot accept that so many of these related events could happen by chance. Darcy is already feeling trapped on the gigantic floating village when she accidentally overhears discussions about a murder for hire plot. Then when members of the crew begin to die under suspicious circumstances, she learns the hard way that she cannot trust anyone onboard the ship. She is forced to run for her own life as she tries to identify both the intended victim of the plot and the murderer before even more disaster strikes. These experiences are frightening to say the least and at worst, they threaten to upset her emotional balance and shatter her fragile mental defenses. Worse still, these terrible events seem to be connected to her past in ways she cannot fathom. She gets some much-needed help in unraveling the maritime mystery from her new shipboard friends including Mick Clayton, a stranger who she soon realizes could be the man she has been waiting for to complete her life. But Mick is traveling under his own emotional cloud and soon more disturbing events also link him with Darcys past and a suspected murderer. All the while, Darcy and her shipmates try as best they can to enjoy the unique geography, architecture, and history of the exotic ports of call they are visiting along the way around the South American continent. Finally, as the cruise sails through its final week the mystery appears to be solved and Darcy believes that further tragedy has been averted. Onshore in a beautiful Argentine city she experiences the greatest upheaval of her life when the mother of all coincidences finally brings her face to face with the past she has worked so hard to forget. She experiences the pain of breaking out of her emotional prison when she meets the one person who will either fulfill her life or destroy her completely. While Darcy finds much needed closure to one chapter of her life, the cruise sails on to what promises to be a restful and romantic end. However, just short of their destination Darcy and Mick meet with unimaginable violence and loss when they are finally forced to confront and battle a vicious killer.