Beginning today, I am serialising my novel, Presumed Dead: A Tale of the Americas:
1,
The Burdens of Privilege
There is nothing unusual in a yacht running aground on the shore of Chesapeake Bay in bad weather.
But,
when the weather is perfectly fine,
when the boat in question (a 30 foot Columbia yacht) is apparently unmanned,
when the boat contains expensive radio equipment,
when a letter, addressed to one William A. McClure, Washington Post Agent # 1401, and another complaining about deliveries of the Post not being made regularly, is found on board,
when the registration papers on board the boat indicate that the owner was a William McClure, who turns out not to be a Washington Post delivery driver after all, but a CIA employee,
when, the previous evening, McClure failed to turn up for a dinner engagement with his wife, from whom he had separated several months earlier, but with whom he has remained on friendly terms,
when a report relating to the strategic strength of the Soviet Bloc is found inside,
when a table has been torn from its hinges, and
when pickle loaf is found on the floor as if the owner had been interrupted in the middle of eating,
then things take on a decidedly different hue.
Some kind of a solution to the question of McClure’s fate emerged, literally, six days later on the afternoon of Sunday, October 1, 1978, when, while cruising two miles south-east of the Patuxent River and three miles off the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, some watermen on a workboat spotted “a green and bloated object” floating in the water. Continue reading ‘Novel Serialization: Presumed Dead: A Tale of the Americas, # 1’
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