A Silent Tide

Book excerpt: "A SILENT TIDE" WINS THE 2014 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARD FOR BEST LEGAL THRILLER!! Beginning with the brutal 1927 ambush of Chesapeake Bay rumrunners at a fog shrouded cove on Maryland's eastern shore and culminating with a final showdown eighty years later when truth meets justice at Harpers Creek Marina in Mathews, Virginia, "A Silent Tide" brings to life the 2007 story of a bay side community racially rocked by the murder of favorite son, all-state athlete Jimmy Jarvis, and the trial of Jamal Billups, the African American man charged with the crime.One-half Michener's "Chesapeake" and one-half "To Kill a Mockingbird", "A Silent Tide" follows the path of attorney David Forbes who, with his wife and two children, moves to this small southern community to escape his hectic world as a Federal Prosecutor in Washington D.C. What Forbes wanted was the quiet world of a country lawyer and to raise his family in the land of steamed blue crab, salt water marsh, nesting ospreys and the great tranquility of the Chesapeake Bay. What he got was an idyllic life sent into a tailspin when he gets appointed to represent Billups and commits the unforgivable sin of believing his client is an innocent man. From the decks of deadrise fishing boats and the boardrooms of Washington law firms, to the drug warehouses of East Baltimore and a Los Zeta heroin distribution center in Sinaloa, Mexico, "A Silent Tide" propels the reader on a page turning ride as Forbes weaves his way through a world of drug smuggling, corruption and murder, dangerously searching for the truth until he is faced with either pleading an innocent man guilty or having his own family killed if he continues his pursuit of the true murderer of Jimmy Jarvis. Undaunted in his task, and befriended by the irascible 89 year old waterman, Walter Taylor, Forbes perseveres until attorney and killer come face to face in an unforgettable pre-dawn dual on a storm tossed sea.