Vigilant
A rescue at sea costs Captain Walker Shaw his command. It also uncovers a trafficking network built on one certainty: the Coast Guard will always choose lives over contraband.
The Work
The Walker Shaw Novels
Maritime crime where the Mississippi meets the Gulf—cutters, towboats, shipyards, barges, and the people who keep America’s working waterfront moving.
Confluence
Walker Shaw knows taking down a shipment is far easier than dismantling the system that carried it. Along New Orleans's industrial waterfront, the most dangerous empires are built with infrastructure.
Two novels, one continuing character, and one stretch of working water.
Walker Shaw is a Coast Guard captain on the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi, where grain barges, chemical tows, shipyards and offshore supply boats all share the same channel. The crimes in these books are not set against that background. They come out of it. Cargo moves, paperwork follows, and the gap between the two is where the trouble starts.
What connects the books is one hard fact the antagonists understand better than anyone: the Coast Guard will always choose lives over contraband. Both novels turn on people who have learned to price that certainty in.
Vigilant comes first—a maritime crime novel, and a complete manuscript. Shaw loses his command in it. Confluence is in development and follows him along the New Orleans industrial waterfront, where the dangerous empires are built out of infrastructure rather than muscle.
The detail comes from forty years on the water across three coasts. The boats, the weather and the procedure are right, because getting them wrong is the fastest way to lose a reader who has been there.
Notes from the Dock
Come Aboard.
Read the prologue to Vigilant first—it is free, and there is nothing to fill in. Then, once or twice a month, dispatches from the Gulf Coast: real maritime history, working waterfronts, life aboard The Mad Hatter, and the afternoons that end up inside the fiction.
No spam. No algorithms. Just occasional notes from the working waterfront.