The Lay-Up at Roebuck Bay
A Novel of the Pearling Fleet

About this book:

The humid stillness before the storm. The last lugger limping home. And a bay full of secrets waiting for the wet season to break.

Captain Jack Mercer has guided the *Northern Star* through six brutal months on the shell grounds—tiger sharks, the bends, and the ruthless calculus of profit and survival. Now Roebuck Bay offers sanctuary: the mangrove shelter of Dampier Creek, the neon temptations of Chinatown, the fragile peace of the lay-up. But the fleet is a powder keg of unpaid wages, racial fault lines, and old blood feuds. And on the horizon, the barometer is falling.

When the *willy-willies* scream in from the North-West, mercy goes overboard with the ballast. In a world where a single breath of compressed air means life or death, and the tide waits for no man, Mercer must navigate a tempest that will test every tether—of rope, of loyalty, of honor. *The Lay-Up at Roebuck Bay* is historical adventure at its most visceral: salt in your lungs, mud under your nails, and the thunder of a cyclone bearing down on a fleet—and a town—balanced on a knife's edge.