More Than You Think You Know

More Than You Think You Know follows three renegade women piloting the 44-foot luxury trawler Blackout through the Heartland Rivers from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico.

With her children grown and gone, Hailey can no longer stomach living with her abusive husband. In the middle of a boating trip, she steals a sailboat and ventures solo across Lake Michigan. In a Chicago harbor, she meets Robin, the chain-smoking divorcee, Captain of the 44-foot luxury trawler Blackout. When the Coast Guard broadcasts a radio alert for the stolen sailboat, Robin insists Hailey seek asylum and travel downriver with her. In Joliet, they take on Trish, a Las Vegas gold-digger who deserts her Sugar Daddy's yacht to join the crew and get out of Illinois.

Hailey, Robin, and Trish navigate the 1,300-mile-long series of rivers and locks through the Heartland Rivers, keeping weary eyes out for barges and Hailey's husband. With no sense of destination beyond Mobile Bay, they are on not one journey, but two: America's Great Loop and the search for their own place to be safe, to be happy, to be themselves.

Beating Windward, 2016 

Paperback, 218 pages, 6 x 9 in