Black Pawl

The captain they call Black Pawl rules his ship with a fist like iron and a silence colder than the Atlantic. His first mate is his son, and on this homeward-bound whaler, that relationship is a wound that will not heal. When a minister and his young companion board at the last port, the vessel becomes a pressure cooker of conflicting loyalties, unspoken desires, and the kind of secrets that surface only when a man has nothing left to lose. Williams understood that the sea doesn't care about bloodlines or redemption. This is a story about what happens when the only thing standing between a father and his son is three thousand miles of ocean and a lifetime of swallowed words. The whales never come, but something far more dangerous surfaces in their place: the truth about what these men are willing to do to be free of each other, and what they'll do to survive.