Dead Reckoning

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REVISED 7/8/26

Synopsis

In their second summer at Allen Point, the warning comes the way warnings come on the Cape: sideways, from a patient on a morning walk, mentioning boats that move at hours when boats do not move. Dr. Wilson notes it the way he has learned to note things. Hamilton notes that someone is running a route through these waters in the dark — and that routes in the dark are never empty. What follows is a navigation problem and a moral one. Across Rock Harbor, Pleasant Bay, and the creeks and reaches of the outer Cape, Hamilton tracks a crossing that depends on the community’s trust and the water’s discretion, toward an arrest that will require knowing not just the route but the names. Dead reckoning is what you do when you have no fixed point to steer by: you calculate from speed, time, and heading, and you trust the arithmetic. Dead Reckoning is the Cape Cod series at its most procedural and propulsive.

Atmospheric, urgent, and morally exacting, Dead Reckoning is a maritime thriller of witness, evidence, and consequence. The tenth volume of The Adventures of Henry Hamilton, it is a novel about reading the dark by what little can be known—then following that line far enough to force the truth into daylight.

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