Dead Calm

By: Charles Williams

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's Summary

Rae and Ingram are 19 days out of the Panama Canal, sailing slowly across the wide, flat Pacific on the Saracen, when they find Hughie Warriner in his dinghy. He was on a pleasure cruise on his yacht, the Orpheus, he says, when food poisoning killed his passengers and his ship began to sink. After an alleged 10 days of desperately fighting to stay afloat, he spied the Saracen and rowed to his salvation.

Finding the stranded yacht, against Warriner’s wishes, Ingram boards the Orpheus. There he finds Warriner’s passengers - very much alive and hungry for revenge against the man who attacked them and left them to drown. Ingram tries to get back to his ship, but it’s too late. Warriner escapes within the Saracen, taking Rae hostage, and Ingram has no means to save them but tattered sails, a sinking ship, and rage that burns hotter than the merciless Pacific sun.

©2012 Charles Williams (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

I found the movie so much better.

I very much enjoyed the movie version of this book. All these years later, I decided to search out the book, thinking I would enjoy it as well. I discovered, surprisingly, that the movie did not keep true to the book, which in this case I found to be a good thing. The book never reached the level of terror and desperation portrayed in the movie. The actual plot differs quite a bit and the movie was just so much more exciting.

Should have been a short story

This book has the potential to be a gripping, suspenseful thriller, but it's bogged down by a lot of unnecessary exposition and dialog that leaves the plot itself in a dead calm.

Dead Calm

At the end of literally every single sentence, the narrator drops his voice to a low, breathy whisper on the final word, and it drove me absolutely insane.