The Keeper's Son Book review

THE KEEPER'S SON by Homer Hickam New York, St Martins Press

Killakeet Island is a fictional spot in the Outer Banks islands of the North Carolina coast, the graveyard of countless ships wrecked on the rocky shoals over the past 400 years. The Thurlow family has tended the tall lighthouse on Killakeet for generations, faithfully sending its powerful beam out across the water to warn ships away from the rocks. Josh Thurlow, the present lighthouse keeper's son, has just returned from Coast Guard duty in Alaska and now in the fall of 1941 as an ensign, he commands the small Coast Guard ship and its civilian crew stationed on Killakeet as an unarmed sea rescue unit.

Theodosia “Dosie” Crossan has recently returned home to Killakeet to “find herself” after several jobs and unsuccessful romantic relationships on the mainland up north. Willow Mallory is the daughter of the town's storekeeper, a pretty girl but “not quite right in the head” or as some townspeople would call it, a hoo-doo. Queenie O'Neal manages the small hotel at Whalebone City, a clump of houses clustered at the island's harbor and Coast Guard station.

The Maudie Jane is an 83 foot long cutter with a machine gun mount at its bow and the machine gun stored in the hold. It's depth charge rack is empty; the government has not yet authorized ammunition for either weapon, the mission being to rescue people and salvage wreckage in the event of shipwreck. Josh Thurlow and his bosun, Eureka Phimble, are the only two with any military training; gunner's mate Ready O'Neal and the half-dozen other crewmen look at the off-shore Gulf Stream current as a good source of fish to occupy time on patrol.

German U-boat captain Otto Krebs commands one of the half-dozen German submarines assigned to the American Atlantic coast. He finds the Outer Banks a fertile hunting ground for the oil tankers and cargo ships on which Britain's existence depends. When America enters the war, the American navy focuses first on the Pacific, where Japan has destroyed most of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Ensign Thurlow and his fishermen crew and their women on Killakeet have only themselves to depend upon in facing the powerful Unterseewaffe of Nazi Germany. Thurlow has a bare few months to prepare his men and his small ship to meet the highly trained seamen of German Admiral Karl Doenitz and his U-boats.

New York Times best-selling author Homer Hickam is a master story teller, weaving together the individual lives of the Americans and Germans who face each other on the Atlantic coast of America at war. The conflicts among the fisher folk of the Outer Banks, the US military, an orphanage struggling to survive in wartime Nazi Germany, and lovers on both sides of the Atlantic trying to maintain their faith in God and each other, all keep the reader engrossed to the end.