Across Oceans

An IndieReader Discovery Award Winner: The Tourist Trail is a literary thriller about endangered species in the world's most remote areas, and those who put their lives on the line to protect them. Biologist Angela Haynes is accustomed to dark, lonely nights as one of the few humans at a penguin research station in Patagonia. She has grown used to the cries of penguins before dawn, to meager supplies and housing, to spending most of her days in one of the most remote regions on earth. What she isn't used to is strange men washing ashore, which happens one day on her watch. The man won't tell her his name or where he came from, but Angela, who has a soft spot for strays, tends to him, if for no other reason than to protect her birds and her work. When she later learns why he goes by an alias, why he is a refugee from the law, and why he is a man without a port, she begins to fall in love-and embarks on a journey that takes her deep into Antarctic waters, and even deeper into the emotional territory she thought she'd left behind. Against the backdrop of the Southern Ocean, The Tourist Trail weaves together the stories of Angela as well as FBI agent Robert Porter, dispatched on a mission that unearths a past he would rather keep buried; and Ethan Downes, a computer tech whose love for a passionate animal rights activist draws him into a dangerous mission.

The long-awaited sequel to "The Tourist Trail" Robert Porter has quit the FBI in search of his long-lost (and presumed dead) love, Noa, only to find himself on the wind-raked shores of Southern Africa working for a seal-rescue organization. When a confrontation with local sealers ends in murder, Robert must abandon the seals and his search to join a private intelligence firm seeking to locate an activist who stole files from one of the world's largest biotech companies. On the other side of the planet, Tracy Morris is an Iowa City hospice nurse by day, while by night she obsessively follows, and ultimately loses, Neil Cameron Jr., whom she sent to prison back when she was a brokenhearted drug addict. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Amy Bakas, an American backpacker unsure about her impending marriage in the States, joins an attractive and mysterious man hitchhiking to the South Island. Along the way, she discovers that he is Neil Cameron, and that he is on the run for his life. The stories of Robert, Amy, and Tracy collide on a desolate beach of Australia in this passionate, adventurous novel about living on the edge of society and love in all its myriad forms.