This fifth sea adventure from Garrison starts out calm enough, but then a stiff wind fills its sails, and it races to a thrilling finish. The plucky heroine, 15-year-old Morgan Page, in search of her missing father, sails single-handedly across the Pacific Ocean in a tiny stolen sailboat. Her father, Aiden, supposedly killed in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, had actually used his supposed death as a ruse to escape from a federal investigation into his actions as the CFO of a private bank, one that is suspected of laundering money for arms dealers. Innocent Page was left holding the bag by the duplicitous bank owner, Henry Ho Hong. The male protagonists take a backseat to the colorful female characters--not only resourceful Morgan but also two feisty lesbian nuns, a ruthless mercenary, and Hong's wife, a psychopathic femme fatale. Readers may have to suspend their disbelief at many of the bizarre plot twists but should find it a rousing voyage nonetheless. --Michael Gannon Copyright 2003 Booklist

Those thinking of abandoning their everyday lives and starting over again on a secret tropical island will find Garrison's latest an invaluable and entertaining instruction manual. The author's earlier books (Sea Hunter; Fire and Ice; Buried at Sea) have shown him a master storyteller/sailor, and this gale force novel of high seas suspense reinforces that judgment. In 2001, the Page brothers, Aiden and Charlie, are in their World Trade Center office plotting a way to prop up the failing investment banking business they helm and at the same time respond to a threatening letter from the Department of Justice. Suddenly, a passenger jet slams into the building, and the fiery aftermath presents a possible solution. In the heavy smoke the brothers become separated, but each escapes the building and disappears. Months later, Aiden's 15-year-old daughter, Morgan, is mourning the loss of her father and Uncle Charlie in the Trade Center disaster when she receives a three-second silent phone call that she insists is from her father. No one believes her, so she runs away and makes a 6,000-mile journey in a 27-foot sailboat to search for him. The brothers, each unaware that the other is alive, flee independently to Blind Man Island, the South Sea hideaway of their boss, the secretive Henry Ho Hong-even though Henry may have been the man who turned them in to the Justice Department. The brothers' journey is fast-paced and exciting, but spunky Morgan's heroic solo sail is the real nail-biter. There are boatloads of action, and Garrison comes up with a real rarity-a plausible, entirely original superweapon. The lives of 50 million Americans hang in the balance. Sailors and landlubbers alike will be up all night with this one. (Jan.) FYI: Garrison received $1 million from Disney for the film rights to his last novel, Fire and Ice. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Garrison (Sea Hunter; Buried at Sea) chronicles a daughter's maritime search for her father. Presumed dead in the attacks on the World Trade Center, Aiden Page and his brother, Charlie, have actually faked their deaths to avoid federal prosecution for investment fraud. Meanwhile, Morgan, 15, is grieving to the point of hysteria: she has hallucinations of Osama bin Laden and, after a mysterious phone call, thinks that Aiden, her father, is still alive. Obsessed with finding him, Morgan steals a small sailboat and, in an epic journey, sails solo from California to Tonga, which her father had often mentioned as a safe haven. There are subplots, other rich characters, and an implausible, potentially earthshaking ending, but this is Morgan's story, filled with the minutiae of preparing for the journey and the details of surviving the journey itself. An alternately exciting and tedious coming-of-age tale; for larger collections.-Robert Conroy, Warren, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Most complicated yet from the writer of sea-faring thrillers (Sea Hunter, 2003, etc.). Boat bum Aiden Page seems a standard Garrison hero: fortysomething and ruggedly good-looking, he handles charters around the island of St. Martin and, due to unresolved conflicts in his past, remains wary of female entanglements. This past conflict, though, is a doozy: once chief financial officer at a small investment bank, Page, on 9/11, was in the World Trade Center office he shared with his sleazy CEO brother Charlie. Both survived the terrorist attack, but Page chose to let his wife and 15-year old daughter Morgan believe him dead. When he glimpses his newspaper obit, though, he comes unhinged and calls his daughter, who shares the Page family enthusiasm for sailboats. Garrison leaves us guessing what the two talk about as he piles up an unwieldy backstory. We learn that Page had had an affair with brother Charlie's wife, did some very peculiar investing for a tug boat company work that literally blew up--when a barge loaded with dynamite exploded--and that brother Charlie, who once taught bin Laden's fighters terrorist techniques in Afghanistan, is also alive and has fled to Blind Man Island, a South Pacific refuge owned by Henry Hong, the shadowy Hong Kong businessman and funder of Page's bank who's married to evil Jin-Shil, North Korean secret agent. The story doesn't really begin until feisty Morgan, visiting her grandfather in Santa Barbara, steals a boat and sails to meet her father at Blind Man Island. Then things soar as Morgan masters the magnificently dangerous, character-building lessons that only the sea--or incipient romance with a Tongan native--can teach. Garrison's overblown, plot-driven high jinks, culminating in the discovery of the superweapon in Hong's island paradise, will turn pages but little else. Nonetheless: satisfying effort from a high talent, even when he's entangled in his own rigging. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.