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A Novel
by Steve Hawk
A churning mix of literary suspense and coastal noir—where how the sea interacts with the land reveals the darker side of Silicon Valley, and three people must reckon with all that is at stake in an age shadowed by greed, totalitarianism, and nuclear terror.
Daybreak. West Virginia. A "small" nuclear bomb detonates beside an Appalachian highway. The weapon's explosive yield is meager, the death count blessedly low. And yet: It is history's first act of nuclear terrorism, and it threatens to tilt the world beyond reckoning.
Months later, surfer and lifeguard Jamie Palmer is patrolling his domain, a treacherous stretch of wild California coast, when he responds to a mysterious nearshore boating accident that jettisoned two people overboard. The victims turn out to be Palmer's best friend—a brilliant, renegade Stanford University professor—and the man's teenage son, Luca. The professor drowns, Luca survives—leaving Palmer as the boy's guardian.
Soon after, Chelsea Wu, a math prodigy and doctoral student, confides to Palmer that she and the professor unearthed a link between a Silicon Valley megacorporation, its sociopathic billionaire founder, and the nuke in West Virginia. When a second device is detonated, this unlikely team—the surfer, the orphan, and the math whiz—must persuade investigators that the bombmakers are not only homegrown but also hiding in plain sight.
An immersive and disturbingly plausible debut, Nearshore delivers a mix of literary suspense and coastal noir. Moving with the speed of a barreling wave, Nearshore also explores deeper clashes: isolation versus community and family, Silicon Valley versus humanity, words versus action, land versus sea.
"With an ease uncommon among first-time novelists, Hawk... stokes suspense by toggling between the [characters'] increasingly desperate perspectives as they unearth a far-reaching conspiracy, all without sacrificing character development or lyrical descriptions of the scenic California setting. Engrossing, graceful, and transporting, this is a terrific—if terrifying—tale of near apocalypse." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This is an exceptionally thoughtful literary thriller, beautifully rendered against the backdrop of a world its author very clearly knows and loves. In the depth and breadth of its story, in the lyricism of its prose, Nearshore will surely establish Steve Hawk as a writer to be reckoned with." —Kem Nunn, author of Tapping the Source, Dogs of Winter, and Tijuana Straits
"Nearshore is the best novel of homegrown nuclear terrorism yet written, chillingly credible, terrifying, and all too plausible." —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
This information about Nearshore was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Steve Hawk is the former editor of Surfer, Sierra, and Stanford Business magazines, and of surfline.com. His first book, Waves, explores the science and aesthetics of ocean waves. He is currently co-writing a book with his brother, Tony Hawk, about the history and culture of skateboarding. He lives near Half Moon Bay, California, where he spends as much time as possible frolicking in the ocean. Nearshore is his first novel.
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