I still wasn’t ready to leave Alexandra and Lawton when I started the next book. I liked Alexandra, a tough, strong, resourceful woman, but I loved Lawton. He filled the “wild card” role that I love in novels. A wild card is a character who follows his internal logic, but that logic doesn’t have much connection to the logic of the larger world. In other words, this is a character full of surprises. Normally my wild card characters are bad guys, but Lawton was so much more engaging to write because he was both spontaneous and sympathetic. He put himself and others at great risk by his unpredictable behavior. I never knew what he was going to do or say next.

The Keys have long glorified their pirate past. At one time piracy and salvaging ships that were lured into wrecking on the reefs were the main industry in the Keys. Nowadays, piracy is used as another tourist attraction. Like many kids, I was fascinated by Long John Silver and Black Beard and the other famous pirates. I’d long wanted to write an updated version of a pirate story, one that in some ways made fun of the glamorization of piracy. Pirates were bad guys. They still are.

This time I decided to drag Thorn into the quest by endangering his best friend’s daughter. Sugarman’s daughter, partly from imitating her “uncle” Thorn, has become an avid naturalist. So when she is kidnapped and hidden away on a deserted beach, it is her naturalist skills she depends on to save her life. This feature, eco-location, (determining a location based on observation of bird life, moon rise, and other details) was the most challenging part of researching and writing this novel.