Salvage

2017 International Thriller Writers Award — Shortlisted, Best Paperback Original Novel
Phillip Scarnum must employ his cunning and seamanship to stay alive and out of prison in this fast-paced, gritty thriller.

Phillip Scarnum is sailing along Nova Scotia’s South Shore when he finds an abandoned lobster boat smashed on the rocks. He risks his life to haul it in, hoping to collect a big salvage fee, but before he can cash in, a fisherman’s body full of bullet holes washes up on a nearby beach. The Mounties seize Scarnum’s prize and start asking tricky questions about how well he knows the fisherman's wild widow. Scarnum needs to find out what happened on the boat, but as soon as he starts to investigate, some heavily armed Mexican drug runners show up, looking for 100 kilos of missing cocaine. Scarnum needs to keep a step ahead of the police and the gangsters if he wants to stay alive and out of prison and get the salvage fee that’s coming to him.

• Fast-paced, gritty thriller from Stephen Maher, a nationally syndicated columnist printed in major Canadian daily newspapers including the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, and Vancouver Sun
• Author has a strong online presence, with 34.7K tweets sent, 1090 photos/videos, and 22.1K followers on Twitter
• Protagonist Phillip Scarnum is a strong, relatable character: Morally ambiguous, at home in the harsh North Atlantic, but a misfit on land.
• Dramatic tension in the novel comes from Scarnum's unknown aims and motivations, which remain veiled until the last chapters
• Stephen Maher vividly captures the harshness of a life spent at sea on the East Coast of Canada