Down Wind and Out of Sight

Down Wind and Out of Sight is a genre-bender, both a fast-paced action novel and a nuanced exploration of the isolation experienced by a "found family" of social outcasts thrown together by circumstance on upper Chesapeake Bay. Witty, moving, often dark and often extremely funny, it features an exceptionally original plot and a cast of utterly unforgettable characters. The "Hole in the Wall Gang" leads the reader through a nuanced exploration of social isolation, rural racism, living with autism and the frantic drive to survive, all cast against a backdrop of escalating action that includes plane crashes, laboratory explosions, mysterious massive electrical power surges, murder, and a hapless whale which definitely ends up where it shouldn't.

Down Wind and Out of Sight features an unlikely cast -- Hugh Ullam, an Aboriginal Australian financial wizard recuited to manage a wealthy American's financial affairs and estate on upper Chesapeake Bay, Rickey Bayard, an autistic adolescent savant with a gift for electronics, Nora Dadmun, Rickey's disfigured caregiver, and Trygve Sletland, an ex-con wrongly imprisoned for manslaughter. The "Hole in the Wall Gang's" attempts to live quietly and anonymously, particularly after the estate owner's unexpected death forces them to live on at Bohemia Manor Farm illegally, are complicated by Ullam's constant harassment by two intensely racist State Police troopers, as well as by a series of catastrophic mishaps when Rickey's experiments with underwater acoustical signals go awry.

As intensive investigation by a government task force closes in and the family realizes it must disband, each character confronts a unique personal crisis, all being forced to make decisions harder than they have ever had to make before.