After 30 rough years of adventure on the seas, Jake Thomas makes landfall in a new and quiet life in Oregon - only to discover that the past dies hard. The secrets he's kept, even from himself, won't stay buried.

Forty years earlier, a beautiful, young woman was murdered during Jake's first voyage as a deck cadet on the American freighter, the SS James Wait. Her children want answers only Jake can give. What really happened that terrible night? Did the wrong man go to jail?

In this riveting story-within-a-story, Jake's peaceful routine in Portland, Oregon, stands in stark...