The Ark of Marindor - Hardcover

A smart and dangerous criminal, with a face like fractured porcelain, has invaded Katherine Dennison's perfect floating world and is now telling her that she doesn't seem to know how things go. "'Is that right?' she said. She felt angry, tired. Trapped not by his gun but by his easy assurance. His confidence. 'And how do things go?' 'A lot like life,' he said. 'You've got to understand, you're arguing with a man with a gun. Two men with guns. Villains, do you understand? Real villains. You tell the kids not to provoke, you mean don't try to jump us. Good advice. So don't you be provoking. Don't get us lost. Don't try to be ... right.'" The trouble is that Katherine, the fascinating 50ish chief character in Barry Targan's marvelous debut thriller, has been right most of her life. Raised on the sea by her sailor father, she became a combat photographer in Vietnam and a famous illustrator of children's books before doubts and tragedy made her retreat to her beautiful sailboat, the Marindor, to restore rightness and balance to her life. Persuaded by a healthy cash offer to take two young divers to the site of a crashed plane, Katherine has now been hijacked by this very disturbing criminal called Barstow who seems to be able to look into her soul. --Dick Adler

BARRY TARGAN's fiction has appeared in such magazines as Esquire, Yankee, and Sewanee Review and also in Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Collection, the Pushcart Prize Collection, and widely elsewhere. He is the author of several books, including Harry Belten & the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, which received the Iowa School of Letters Award in Short Fiction and Kingdoms, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in the Novel. He lives in Greenwich, New York with his wife, painter Arleen Targan.