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GHOSTING
by David Poyer
St Martin's Minotaur, November 2010
293 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0312613024


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Dr Jack Scales, a neurosurgeon, has a seemingly good idea: he buys a sleek, top-of-the-line sailboat and sets sails for Bermuda with his family. But it's a bad idea on so many levels: Scales has some sailing experience, but not much. He buys an expensive sailboat, but not necessarily the best one for sailing on the open water. And his family is falling apart: his wife Arlen is having an affair, their 20-year-old son Ric is schizoaffective and their teenage daughter Haley resents being on the trip and missing a swimming meet.

Poyer writes with mounting tension. Right before the trip, Scales has a run-in with a drunken vagrant who sneaked onto the boat, something that will come back to haunt him. The trip begins well enough, and the family has what is normally an awe-inspiring encounter with a whale that comes close to the sailboat. But Poyer writes the scene with dread; for the Scales, the whale is an ill omen. And things do get worse. The family runs into a storm that almost wrecks the boat; Ric's illness grows worse, with the voices whispering dark commands; and, finally, four drug smugglers hijack the boat and threaten the family. The theme of ghosts runs throughout the book. Early on, the family has to use a "ghosting" genoa, a sail for light winds, when their original jib can no longer be used. The daughter, Haley, thinks she sees a ghost. And the smugglers talk of "ghosting" people -- killing them.

These smugglers are indeed ruthless, and it's hard to tell which family member, if any, will survive the journey. The story was a compelling page-turner, at times reading like a Stephen King novel -- eerie and full of menace. Poyer is a good writer. The author, who has written eighteen Navy and sea novels, captures the beauty, as well as the perils, of sailing. There are some supernatural elements in GHOSTING. If you like Stephen King, you'd probably very much like this story. If you don't, be warned that the supernatural does figure centrally in the denouement of this novel.

Despite Poyer's atmospheric writing, the book has a huge drawback: dreadful editing. There were many misspellings and typos, starting with the first sentence. The author places the Connecticut family in Manhassatt Bay off Long Island Sound. In real life, there's a Manhasset Bay, but it's across the Sound, on Long Island, New York. The boat, named Slow Dance, appears as Slow Dream in another spot. The smugglers, from Colombia, often speak in Spanish, but not only are the phrases incredibly inaccurate, but the Spanish language is mangled. Grating inaccuracies and bad grammar quickly bring down the level of enjoyment of a book -- and did so in this case.

GHOSTING isn't for everyone. But if you can deal with the supernatural (and bad editing), then set sail with a gripping read.

§ Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.

Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, January 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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