Spider, a decent man forced into the violent pirate life years ago, is finally on the verge of leaving all that behind and reuniting with his wife, Emma, and the son he last saw as a baby. He and his friends - Odin the ancient buccaneer and Hob the young swashbuckler - are working as honest seamen aboard Minuet when the calm journey from England to Nantucket takes a dark turn. A shipmate is murdered while working aloft, and Spider can't help but try to figure out who the killer is - even as his friend Odin warns him that getting involved might lead authorities to discover Spider's own piratical past.
Agatha Christie meets Patrick O'Brian in the first book in a new series of swashbuckling historical mysteries featuring Spider John Rush, a most reluctant pirate. 1722-aboard a pirate ship off the American Colonial Coast. Spider John Rush never wanted to be a pirate, but it had happened and he'd learned to survive in the world of cut and thrust, fight or die. He and his friend Ezra knew that death could come at any moment, from grapeshot or storm winds or the end of a noose. But when Ezra is murdered in cold blood by a shipmate, Spider vows revenge. On a ship where every man is a killer many times over, how can Spider find the man who killed his friend? There is no law here, so if justice is to be done, he must do it. He will have to solve the crime and exact revenge himself. One wrong step will lead to certain death, but Spider is determined to look into the dying eyes of the man who killed his friend, even if it means his own death.