Surface Tension » (Reprint)

Christine Kling spent more than twenty years on or around boats and has cruised most of the world's oceans. She received her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University in Miami. She lives in South Florida.

Years ago Seychelle Sullivan had the chance to save a person's life. But on that summer night in Fort Lauderdale, lost in a world of teenage resentment and loneliness, Seychelle was not able to comprehend any pain but her own. Today Seychelle captains her forty-six-foot salvage boat out of Fort Lauderdale's New River. She's seen change sweep through South Florida, and has witnessed friends and lovers come and go. But she's never escaped that one moment when she could have made a difference and didn't. Now each time she rescues a ship in distress, a little hope stirs in her again.

On a steamy Florida morning Seychelle is answering a Mayday call launched from a five-million-dollar Broward yacht called Top Ten. Racing her fiercest competitor for salvage rights, Seychelle has a personal stake in this rescue: Her former lover, Neal Garrett, is the yacht's hired skipper. But being the first to reach Top Ten will lead Seychelle to a bloody payday. A beautiful woman has been stabbed to death onboard. And Garrett is no where to be found.

Even on shore, the pressures are mounting - Seychelle owes money on her boat, and her love life is in shambles. Within twenty-four hours of finding the dead woman and towing Top Ten out of the surf, Seychelle realizes that she has stepped into a lethal business involving some of South Florida's sleaziest criminals.

While the police treat her as the prime suspect, Seychelle begins to unravel a tangled plot centered on a strip club where "all the girls are tens on top." Discovering the sordid secrets of the owner of the yacht she rescued and the fate of the man she once loved, Seychelle is connecting human predators with innocent victims, and a mystery on land with a mystery buried deep beneath the sea. Now, to find out what really happened to Neal Garrett, Seychelle must retrace his last steps, through two murders and a horrific crime wave to a final confrontation with someone who may want to kill her...or be her salvation.

Publishers Weekly

In this strong suspense debut, Seychelle Sullivan owns a salvage tug near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and makes a precarious living piloting luxury yachts and sportfishing boats in the Florida waters. When her radio picks up a distress call from the Top Ten, she hurries to the scene, hoping to net a windfall. The luxurious yacht is skippered by her former lover, Neal, who seems to have abandoned ship and left a dead body behind. Who is the dead girl, where is Neal, why do the police suspect Seychelle, and how much can she hope to recover for salvaging the yacht? When she finds her modest cottage has been searched and her stash of emergency money is missing, she figures Neal must be alive, hiding from the police or from the girl's killer. The Top Ten's representative offers a paltry sum to settle the salvage claim, so Seychelle decides to find out who the real owner is and go to arbitration. As the tension and suspense build, Seychelle's existence becomes increasingly precarious. Kling vividly portrays a characteristic dichotomy of the Sunshine State-native Floridians trying to earn an honest living in an atmosphere where anything and anyone can be tainted by loan sharks, drug money or worse. As a female tugboat captain, Seychelle is one of the genre's more unusual amateur sleuths, and Kling makes her one of its more endearing ones as well. (Dec.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.