September 2025
The total loss of SS Yarmouth Castle in 1965 is the deadliest passenger ship disaster off the American coast since the burning of SS Morro Castle in 1934.
Randall Peffer
Randall Peffer is the author of fourteen nonfiction books as well as eleven crime and romantic suspense novels. His book, Watermen is a documentary of the lives of the Chesapeake’s fishermen. It won the Baltimore Sun’s Critic’s Choice award and was Maryland Book of the Year. His crime novel Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues was a Lambda Award finalist and has been optioned for film. His recent book Where Divers Dare: The Hunt for the Last U-boat debuted to very strong reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Divers has a five-star readers’ rating on Amazon.
Peffer has published over 350 travel-lifestyle features for National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Sail, Wooden Boat, and most of the U.S major metro dailies. He holds a 100-ton master’s license and has logged over 100,000 miles at sea.
He taught literature and writing for thirty-seven years at Phillips Academy, Andover.
Windward Passage:
A Maxi Yacht in her Sixth Decade
Non Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Conceived by a lumberman-sailor, drawn by a young and then-untested designer, and built of spruce on a Bahamian beach in 1968, the 73’ ocean-racing maxi-yacht WINDWARD PASSAGE had an improbable rise to stardom during her twenty-year racing career. When he first laid eyes on her soon after her completion, the legendary designer Olin Stephens called the yacht “a masterpiece.” In the ensuing years, WINDWARD PASSAGE and her crews roamed the planet, winning the world’s major ocean races and attracting legions of admirers and competitors. She continues today, stronger and swifter than built, as a world-cruiser.
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Where Divers Dare:
The Hunt for the Last U-Boat
Non Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
On April 16, 1944, the SS Pan Pennsylvania was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-550 off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. In return the sub was driven to the surface with depth charges, and then sent to the bottom of the ocean by three destroyer escorts that were guarding the naval convoy. For more than sixty years the location of the U-boat’s wreck eluded divers.
In 2012, a team found it—the last undiscovered U-boat in dive-able waters off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, more than three hundred feet below the surface.
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Never to Return
Surviving the Worst Combat Loss in the History of the US Coast Guard
Non Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Never to Return is the harrowing tale of the torpedoing and sinking of a Coast Guard ship and the loss of 171 Coast Guardsmen off the coast of Iceland during WWII. The USS Leopold was a U.S. Coast Guard destroyer escort in a convoy of merchant ships carrying war materiel to England, on the lookout for the deadly U-boat wolf packs lurking in the North Atlantic. The Leopold was largely unarmored, lightly armed, and no match for the U-255’s torpedoes. Never to Return is the story of gunner Sparky Nersasian and his shipmates’ struggles to survive the Leopold’s sinking.
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Dangerous Shallows
In Search of the ghost ships of cape cod
Non Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Dangerous Shallows tells the story of a quest to solve maritime cold-cases. The odyssey takes the reader along for a moment-by-moment look at the events surrounding the loss of more than twenty different ships, and includes the stories of discovering their wrecks and learning about the final hours of each of these ships.
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logs of the dead pirates society
A Schooner Adventure Around Buzzards Bay
Non Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
This tale of exploration and adventure is a warm account of the people and places around the waters of Southern Massachusetts.
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Watermen
Non Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
For three hundred years, generations of Tilghman Islanders have lived by harvesting the waters of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. They are watermen, an old English term for commercial fishermen, and their lives today retain much of the spirit and simplicity that characterized their land’s first Anglo-Saxon settlers. Watermen is the story of their lives told by Randy Peffer, a young writer who came to Tilghman Island to search for his ancestral roots and left a year later with the makings of this book. Watermen is a singular work, a book that will touch anyone who has ever glimpsed the peope of the Chesapeake, whether in literature or in life.
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Killing Neptune's daughter
Cape & Islands Novel #1
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Noelle Werlin, the beautiful wife of a rock ‘n’ roll legend, was never able to shake the ghosts of her past, but dying at the hands of one of those ghosts never crossed her mind.
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provincetown follies, bangkok blues
Cape & Islands Novel #2
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Luang kho ngu hao. Now I put my hand in the cobra’s throat.Tuki Aparecio did not kill her lover. She did not burn down the Painted Lady–at least, not with fire. Tuki lit up the stage nightly, with her hair in braids and her glorious costumes; glittering, smoldering, singing her heart out for an audience who loved her. She brought the house down with her performances. But she’s innocent of murder, innocent of arson.How can Michael DeCastro possibly hope to defend this beautiful drag queen, who brings with her a whole pack of nasty little secrets, straight from Bangkok’s notorious tenderloin district? She speaks in aphorisms, the wisdom of the Buddha combined with the lyrics of Whitney Houston. She is fascinating. And Michael can’t let her go to jail.
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old school bones
Cape & Islands Novel #3
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Winter in a New England prep school brings term papers, wet snow, and the suicide of a young black student. Except Liberty Baker’s friends are convinced she couldn’t have taken her own life, and Liberty’s faculty advisor, Awasha Patterson, believes them.
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bangkok dragons, cape cod tears
Cape & Islands Novel #4
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
When Michael Decastro gets an email from Tuki his long-gone client, the lady of ten thousand mysteries he doesn t hesitate a moment. He heads to Bangkok to find … what? He doesn t know. To face what dangers? He hasn t imagined. All he knows is that she s beckoned, and he can t resist her call.
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listen to the dead
Cape & Islands Novel #5
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Inspired by one of the largest unsolved cases of serial killings in the United States, the New Bedford Serial Killings of 1988. Harbormaster Corby Church finds the bones of a human body on Bird Island off Cape Cod. As brassy, young police detective Yemanjá Colón struggles with the case, she realizes that Church may know more than he’s letting on, and a trip he took to the Bahamas in the ’80s may prove the key.
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screams and whispers
Cape & Islands Novel #6
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Young Cape Cod public defender and commercial fisherman Michael Decastro ventures to Saigon with his father, a Vietnam War vet, to come to the aid of his long-lost client and love-interest Tuki Aparecio.
The half-Vietnamese, half-African American diva is in a fight of her life with a mysterious dragon lady from Indochina’s underworld. At stake is an antique ruby in Tuki’s possessionand the mortal souls of everyone Decastro loves.
Ghosts that the Decastros and Tuki carry with them from Cape Cod and Southeast Asia will have their day.
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Southern Seahawk
Civil War at Sea #1
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
The first novel in the Seahawk Trilogy, grows from the true story of Commander Rafael Semmes’ rise to infamy, becoming the Union’s Public Enemy Number One. In June, 1861, Semmes’ Confederate cruiser Sumter makes a daring escape through the Federal Blockade of the Mississippi. So begins the commander’s career as the Southern Seahawk. With a hand-picked crew of Southern officers and mercenary seamen, Semmes seizes eight enemy ships in four days, a record never surpassed by any other captain of a warship.
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seahawk hunting
Civil War at Sea #2
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
In Seahawk Hunting, Rafael Semmes abandons his broken raider, the Sumter, which is penned in by the Federals near Gibraltar. In the meantime, he has the Brits build him a new ship in Liverpool. Called the 290, it is the fastest commercial raider designed for its time, and it is waiting for Semmes in the Azores. After taking command of the ship he sets out seizing and burning whalers at the rate of one a day, sails back across the North Atlantic against the gulf stream where he picks off another dozen merchant ships headed to Europe.
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seahawk burning
Civil War at Sea #3
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Seahawk Burning , follows the real-life adventures of Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes and his ship, the C.S.S. Alabama, on the final legs of their reign of terror on the high seas. The novel chronicles Semmes’s rise to mythic stature as he becomes Lincoln’s public enemy number one, seizing and burning scores of Yankee ships in the Caribbean Sea, the south Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea before heading to France for sanctuary…all the while dodging scores of federal Navy ships pursuing him.
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The Blockade Runner
A Spy Story of the Civil War
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Sandy Roberts is desperately hoping this is his last mission for the Secret Service of the United States. He wants out. He is heartsick with all the betrayals and blood on his hands. But the service has tapped him for the most dangerous mission of his career. It is the first year of the American Civil War. England looks poised to enter the conflict on the side of the Confederacy, and the Union is losing the battle for control of the sea. As a master mariner Sandy Roberts is just the man Federal spymasters think will help them unravel how so many ships are evading the Union Navy’s blockade of the Confederacy. But they know there is more than a chance that their man might go rogue.
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forever barcelona
A Love story
Fiction | Available in Hardcover | Ebook | Audio
Seahawk Burning , follows the real-life adventures of Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes and his ship, the C.S.S. Alabama, on the final legs of their reign of terror on the high seas. The novel chronicles Semmes’s rise to mythic stature as he becomes Lincoln’s public enemy number one, seizing and burning scores of Yankee ships in the Caribbean Sea, the south Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea before heading to France for sanctuary…all the while dodging scores of federal Navy ships pursuing him.
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© 2025 Randall Peffer. All rights reserved.