In this surfer noir debut mystery, set on the coast of Northern California, a former professional surfer's life takes a dangerous turn when he discovers a terrifying link between a Silicon Valley billionaire and a nuclear terrorist network, and sets out to avenge his friend's death.
It's a crisp spring morning in Appalachia, and on an empty stretch of Highway 77 five miles from Charleston, West Virginia, a flatbed truck barrels toward a secret detonation site, carrying the world's first homemade nuclear weapon.
Two thousand miles to the west, lifeguard and former professional surfer Jamie Palmer is cruising the Pacific Coast Highway south of San Francisco, looking to ride a few waves on his lunch break, when he gets a call about an unmanned boat circling out of control beyond the surf zone. Palmer races to the scene and realizes the boat belongs to his best friend, Alexander "Boneyard" Bonnard, a renegade Stanford University professor.
Boneyard has perished in a mysterious accident, leaving his teenage son Luca reeling. Before they can process their grief-and just as Palmer becomes Luca's sole foster parent-one of Boneyard's doctoral students, Chelsea Wu, contacts them to share a secret that will dramatically alter the course of their lives: In the course of their research, digging into the analytics behind corporate culture, Chelsea and Boneyard uncovered a link between a sociopathic billionaire, the Silicon Valley megacorporation he owns, and the nuke in West Virginia mere days before Boneyard disappeared into the Pacific. Chelsea is sure she's found evidence that another bomb is under construction, and she knows they must band together and intervene.
A churning mix of literary suspense and coastal vibes, Nearshore explores what it means to forge family out of tragedy and questions the moral choices we face in an age shadowed by greed. Written with the intensity of Noah Hawley's Before the Fall and the visceral immersion of William Finnegan's surfing classic Barbarian Days, Nearshore unfolds along Northern California's wild coast, animating clashes both physical and metaphysical: land versus sea, loneliness versus love, Silicon Valley versus the world. Steve Hawk is the former editor of Surfer, Sierra, and Stanford Business magazines, and of surfline.com. He also served as a writer and consultant on the HBO series John from Cincinnati. His first book, Waves, explored the science and aesthetics of ocean waves. He is currently co-writing a book with his brother, Tony Hawk, about the history and culture of skateboarding, to be published by Atria in 2026. He lives near Half Moon Bay, California, where he spends as much time as possible frolicking in the ocean.
