Sunday, December 1, 2019

Sandy Mason - Mystery on the High Seas


Sandy Mason is an avid sailor who loves to travel. After this former Long Island software engineer retired, he decided to reinvent himself as a novelist and has drawn on his two passions to pen the Johnny Donohue Adventures - a series of novels that take readers on page-turning voyages sure to thrill mystery buffs.


Mason moved to Florida 20 years ago because of a job transfer. He spent some time commuting between St. Petersburg and Washington, DC before deciding to retire and take up writing. “I was always interested in writing,” he says. “I secretly wrote short stories for years, but I never showed them to anybody. And I always loved books and literature, so I thought I’d try my hand at it.”


His first novel, Storm Damage, introduces Johnny Donohue, a man who leaves the high tech corporate world to move to the west coast of Florida. Mason admits that he has a lot in common with his signature character.  “Growing up, I always wanted to be a detective,” he says. “Now I can be.” But he is quick to point out that Johnny can do things he’d never be able to do.  For example, in Storm Damage, Johnny is drawn into investigating the death of his best friend’s wife in a mystery that takes him from New York’s Westhampton Beach to the Florida coast.


The next book in the series, Man Overboard, has Johnny following a trail of money laundering, stolen boats, drug smuggling and kidnapping to find an experienced sailor that has gone missing at sea. In Sailor Take Warning, the third Johnny Donohue Adventure, Johnny enlists the help of his friend and former police officer, Lonnie Turner, to investigate the murder of a St. Petersburg tour boat captain that leads them into the seamy world of Tampa’s strip clubs.


While his first three novels were straight mysteries, Mason decided to try “something a bit deeper” in book four. “Since I’ve always been interested in history, I decided to include a historical element in the story,” he explains. The result was Havana Moon, a novel based on his grandfather’s experiences in the Spanish American War. The story has Johnny trying to untangle clues leading to the death of a local marine electronics expert after discovering a Spanish American War artifact that has international consequences. 


Mason continued the history-mystery connection in his next two novels. In “Silver Voyage,” the death of William Haggerty, a family friend, sends Johnny digging into the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who deciphered the German Enigma Machine in WWII. “William lived in my neighborhood in New York,” Mason says. “He assisted Turing in tracking down the Nazi codes and developed the trigger mechanism for the atomic bomb. I’m still friends with his daughter.”


Mason’s next release, Cuban Exile, has Johnny and Lonnie sailing to Cuba to deliver a sailboat to Doctors Without Borders. When Johnny becomes a suspect in the murder of a Russian physician, his efforts to prove his innocence lead him back to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov,  the Russian naval officer who may have saved the world from nuclear annihilation. “JFK was my boyhood hero,” Mason says. “I followed his administration closely and wanted to write about him. Some people have bad impressions of him, but he kept us out of war.”


In 2018, Mason published a follow-up novel to Cuban Exile titled Global Position. Johnny Donohue returns to track down the players in an international money laundering ring. Johnny responds to the scene of a fatal boating accident which ultimately leads him and Lonnie to the principal players of an illegal crime syndicate. Johnny’s checkered past makes him a suspect in the police investigation to uncover the true cause of the crash. He is hounded by law enforcement and threatened by unruly reporters who spout half truths about his past life.  Johnny’s knowledge of navigation equipment, as well as his uncanny feel for the waterways that define his life, lead him through a confusing maze of clues while eluding attempts on his own life.


Mason’s next novel, Killer Tide, is a story of greed, corruption and murder surrounding Florida’s fight with red tide. It is scheduled for release in May, 2020. “The thing I enjoy most about writing is the sense of accomplishment when I’ve gotten an idea on paper and know someone else will look at it,” Mason says. He hopes readers will enjoy watching his characters evolve and become better people as they sail into more intricate crimes.



For more information, visit the author’s Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/sandymason or his website at www.sandymason.com.

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