THE GHOST SHIP - Blending history and fiction

A famous tall ship and an adventurous woman...what they could do for the world

     What if you could go back to 1921 and climb aboard a great five-masted schooner on her maiden voyage?
You’d be a witness to history; you’d be on her decks when her keel smashed into an Outer Banks shoal. You’d get to know the villains who caused the tragedy. Was it pirates, Russians, rumrunners? Or something else?
Would you dare?
Ann Gavrion did and her life was never the same.

THE HISTORY:
One cold, foggy morning in January, 1921, a five-masted schooner in full sail plowed into Diamond Shoal in the infamous Graveyard of the Atlantic. Known to history as The Ghost Ship, her officers and crew were not on board and their bodies never washed ashore. The only living thing on board was a six-toed cat. Also, her anchors and lifeboats were missing. Six agencies investigated the mystery, but it was never solved.

THE NOVEL:
Ninety years later, Ann Gavrion travels to Cape Hatteras to get over the loss of her fiancé in an airplane crash. She meets the enigmatic, yet charming, Lawrence Curator on the beach.
Behind her she hears the cries of villagers. “Shipwreck!”
A surfman runs up and shouts that the missing schooner, her sails set, is aground on the shoal. Ann recognizes the enormous ship from a photograph she’d seen the night before.
So begins her journey back to 1921 with the man the Navy sent to investigate the grounding of the great ship.
When Lawrence and Ann solve the mystery, Ann must return to her world. On the very beach where she’d begun her voyage with Lawrence, she meets his great-grandson, Rod. Exhausted, wet, she spills an account of her fabulous sea adventure. He calls her a charlatan and accuses her of using his famous ancestor to write a first person account of the tragedy for her magazine.
How many times, how many ways, must she prove that her voyage was real to Rod and the unbelievers of the world?

Available at: http://tiny.cc/9hrsy

Gerrie Ferris Finger
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com

THE GHOST SHIP hits the - uh - Kindle

...and the Nook.

Used to be we could brag that our books hit the shelves. Not so much any longer. Oh I still have a hard cover publisher, but I've come over to the (used to be) "dark" side of the publishing world. I'm a self-publisher. I've called my new company, Crystal Skull Publishing, and our first edition is THE GHOST SHIP, a paranormal seafaring suspense based on a real ghost ship: The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals.

I look forward to sharing more with you about this venture.

Best,
Gerrie

http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com
http://tiny.cc/aj8jt

TOP TWENTY WELL-READ CITIES

Amazon.com Names America’s Most Well-Read Cities

Is it any wonder that Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Harvard University calls home, topped Amazon.com’s recent listing of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America?

I lived in Cambridge eons ago. Residents walked along streets reading books, book stores - be they large retail outlets or mom and pop resellits - on nearly every block, citizens in the parks reading magazines or best sellers, riders of MBTA missing their stops while engrossed in Follett or Oates. Add the Kindle and residents are now ordering more books, magazines and newspapers in print and Kindle formats. The survey began Jan. 1, 2011 and was based on cities with more than 100,000 residents. Cambridge residents also ordered the highest number of nonfiction books.

The Amazon.com top 20 list:

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts
2. Alexandria, Virginia
3. Berkeley, California
4. Ann Arbor, Michigan
5. Boulder, Colorado
6. Miami, Florida
7. Salt Lake City, Utah
8. Gainesville, Florida
9. Seattle, Washington
10. Arlington, Virginia
11. Knoxville, Tennessee
12. Orlando, Florida
13. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
14. Washington, D.C.
15. Bellevue, Washington
16. Columbia, South Carolina
17. St. Louis, Missouri
18. Cincinnati, Ohio
19. Portland, Oregon
20. Atlanta, Georgia

Happy to see Atlanta, my adopted home of many decades ago, sneak onto the list. St. Louis, my birth place, came in 17.
Echoing results from Sisters in Crime’s recent Mystery Book Buyer Study, nearly half of the cities on the Amazon.com list are located below the Mason-Dixon line.

The Washington, D.C. area includes three of the top 20 cities – Alexandria, Va. (#2), Arlington, Va. (#10) and Washington itself (#14). Alexandria residents also topped the list of buyers of children’s books.

The sunshine state, Florida, has three cities in the top 20 – Miami (#6), Gainesville (#8) and Orlando (#12).

“We hope book lovers across the country enjoy this fun look at where the most voracious readers reside,” said Mari Malcolm, managing editor of Books at Amazon.com.

Submitted by
Gerrie Ferris Finger
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/

SOON TO BE RELEASED: THE GHOST SHIP