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How nautical charts, the Sea Ray, and the Florida and Georgia coast—from Cumberland Island and St. Marys to Savannah—inspired the world of Slip 47.

One of the more difficult things about writing a novel is handing your manuscript to someone else and asking for an honest opinion. You've spent months, sometimes years, developing the characters, constructing the plot, and working through every detail of the story. By the time you're finished, you know these people almost as well as you know yourself.

For more than two decades, I have spent much of my professional life inside criminal courtrooms. That experience teaches you a few things. One of them is that cases rarely look as simple from the inside as they do from the outside.

Every novel eventually reaches a point where an idea becomes a story. For Slip 47, that happened around a simple question: What if something completely ordinary turned out not to be ordinary at all?

Savannah was never going to be just a backdrop for Slip 47. Some places can serve as scenery. You can move the characters through them, mention a few streets or landmarks, and the story continues without the setting changing much of anything. Savannah is different.