Riders of Land and Tide — Jose LaTour

For most people life is a monotonous routine. On board a non-belligerent nuclear submarine designed to rescue crews from disabled ballistic missile subs life is incredibly boring. For two or three months the crew must stand ready for a disaster that hardly ever happens, perform maintenance on an array of microphones on the floor of the ocean, and occasionally do a little snooping around enemy naval bases. If not on watch sailors can sleep, read, play games, watch movies, exercise and ruminate about family, friends, lovers. Occasionally they try to discern what the heck they were thinking when they enrolled. Days creep by like a snail on codeine. But if unexpectedly the boat surfaces, loads 22 tons of cocaine and a complete stranger comes aboard, odds are that life in that submarine will turn unpredictably frightening. Everywhere couples settle into habit patterns. Get up, have breakfast, go to work, do the same thing they've been doing for so long, go to the grocery store, return home, prepare supper, read a story to the kids, watch a show, go to bed. Birthdays, holidays and going on vacation once a year break the routine until blowing the candles; setting up the Christmas tree and sunbathing at the same beach become, well, routines. However, if all of a sudden armed foreigners land where peaceful people live, take hostages and threaten to kill them unless their demands are met, locals want to return to their boring lives immediately. Riders of Land and Tide is an action-packed thriller that recounts the lives of three main characters from birth and narrates how circumstances beyond their control cleared paths for them. When the thorniest path crosses the other two, all hell breaks loose. The author of this book - who has been writing crime fiction and thrillers for thirty-five years, won the IACW's Hammett and was nominated for the Edgar - believes this is his best novel. He hopes it will entertain you, inform you and make you wonder whether those who li