Dead Reckoning
Scott Davis
A missed radio call. A wrecked boat. A man who knows the sea doesn't lie, but people do.
Nathan Hale has spent six years trying to become ordinary.
Once a Naval Intelligence officer, he now lives aboard a wooden cutter in Port Townsend, Washington, making his living as a shipwright and keeping his world small: old tools, cold water, paper charts, and the nightly amateur-radio check-in that lets a handful of damaged veterans say they are still alive.
Then Coop misses the net.
By morning, Coop's fishing boat has been pulled off the rocks, and his disappearance is already becoming the kind of story people know how to ignore: an old veteran, a rough life, a bad night on the water. The sheriff has no reason to look closer. The Coast Guard has already moved on.
But Nathan reads damage for a living, and what he finds on Coop's wreck is not accident, weather, or bad luck. It is workmanship.
Someone staged the boat. Someone staged the story. And somewhere in the gray water of the Salish Sea, a hidden maritime operation is counting on the world to keep looking away.
To find his friend, Nathan must use the skills he walked away from: surveillance, pattern recognition, and the cold arithmetic of violence. But this time the consequences are not on a screen. They are in the weather, in the water, and in his hands.
Dead Reckoning is a grounded maritime thriller about analog competence, moral injury, and the cost of knowing when the official story is a lie.