NORTHING launches on Monday!

In navigation, a northing is the distance a vessel has traveled north of a fixed reference point. It’s a plain measurement, the kind you log and move past. I chose it as the title of my first Coast Guard thriller because the book is about a ship, a crew, and a man who spends the whole story finding out how far north he’s been sent, and how far from himself.

NORTHING follows the USCGC Bertholf, the fleet's newest cutter, on a transit that will make her the first of her class to cross the Arctic Circle. The crew has t-shirts printed for the occasion. The local paper has run the story. Machinery Technician Second Class Jordan Cale has spent nine months aboard, doing rounds in the engine room and keeping his history to himself.

Then a mayday comes over channel 16 in the Chukchi Sea; the ship turns toward it like any cutter, and the voyage becomes something else. I won’t say more than that here. The first chapters will do it better.

I wrote this book out of my own working life. I served with the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, and then spent nineteen years in the Coast Guard, much of it in search and rescue. The procedures in these pages, the radio calls, the engineering rounds, and the way a crew takes care of each other when things go badly come from the people I served with. I wanted a reader who has stood a watch to recognize the ship, and a reader who never has to feel what it costs.

I started this story years ago and set it down when my kids came along. When I picked it back up, it was clear it needed more than one book. NORTHING is the first of three. DATUM and FIX finish the story, and I've written/drafted all three, so no one who starts this series will be left waiting for an ending. And two more are outlined!

NORTHING is coming to Amazon in ebook and print on Monday, October 26, 2026 at 5pm Pacific. It's available for pre-order on Kindle at https://a.co/d/04NWRxeY.

Thanks for reading, and fair winds. ~r