The Story Behind Slip 47

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?

A marina slip seemed perfect. There is nothing mysterious about one. It is simply a numbered place where a boat is kept. Slip 12. Slip 31. Slip 47. Hundreds of people could walk past one without giving the number a second thought. And that was precisely why I liked it.

The Things We Stop Seeing

We move through systems every day without really noticing them: case numbers, routing slips, file names, parking spaces, account numbers, boat slips. Most exist only to organize things. Because they are so ordinary, we learn not to pay attention to them.

But what if one of those ordinary identifiers connected things that were never supposed to be connected? That idea opened the door to the novel.

In Slip 47, Dean Mercet begins with questions that appear manageable. He is a lawyer. Questions are part of the job. But answers create new questions, and eventually the trail reaches beyond what he originally believed he was investigating. The marina slip becomes important not because there is anything inherently sinister about it. It becomes important because of what it connects.

Building the Mystery

I wanted the central mystery to develop gradually. Dean does not wake up one morning and discover a massive conspiracy sitting neatly on his desk. He finds pieces. Some appear important. Some appear meaningless. Some are misunderstood. And some only become significant after something else happens much later.

That is closer to the kind of mystery I enjoy reading. The reader should be able to look backward and realize that the information was there. The meaning simply was not. That distinction became important while writing Slip 47.

Why the Marina Matters

The coastal setting also gave the story another dimension. A marina is an interesting place because it exists between land and water. People arrive by car and leave by boat. Boats can remain tied to the same dock for months or disappear overnight. People know one another without necessarily knowing much about one another.

There are records, keys, cameras, dock boxes, fuel receipts, maintenance logs, and numbers attached to nearly everything. It is an environment built around movement but organized by small pieces of information. For a thriller, that creates possibilities.

More Than a Number

Eventually, Slip 47 became about more than solving a mystery. It became a story about how information survives, how institutions remember, how people protect what they have built, and how mistakes that once seemed insignificant can become part of something much larger over time.

Dean enters that world believing he is following evidence. What he gradually discovers is that evidence does not exist by itself. Someone creates it. Someone records it. Someone files it. Someone decides where it belongs. And sometimes someone decides that it would be better if no one ever looked at it again.

That is where Slip 47 begins: with something ordinary, a number, a place at a marina, and a question that refuses to go away.

Slip 47 — A Dean Mercet Thriller arrives October 22, 2026.