Kill Shot

More than a dozen WWII-era German U-boats remain unaccounted for, the fate of their crews unknown. In summer 2012, sonar scanning found a submerged vessel of the right dimensions in Canadian province of Labrador. From this find grew Kill Shot, a fictionalization of the events that switches between the circumstances of the war that led the German crew to submerge and eventually die in the river, and the adventures that occur seventy years later when a teen boy finds the remains of the vessel and crew.


The boat’s finder, Wednesday Smythe, is a pimply 14-year-old high school freshman whose parents died when he was too young to remember them. Shuttling between foster care and a group home, he finds himself in a rural trailer with a hair-cutting entrepreneur for a stepmother and an unemployed stepfather who pawns the foster kids’ things to pay the bills. Without phone, game console, or tablet, Wednesday is forced into long walks along the river.


His only friend in this remote location, a girl called “Stump,” has been raised by her reclusive father with almost no social contact. She can’t use a phone, but she can wield a chainsaw. Wednesday’s other friend, Wally, is embittered and angry in foster care, lashing out in ways that threaten Wednesday’s growing rapport with his new family. All three are drawn together in a fast-paced adventure pitting their wits against the bad guys, and the cops who want to bust them for any number of nefarious deeds.