overboard

OVERBOARD: A Story of Betrayal and Survival
by M.J. Johansen

Mike Reyes has known Ted Gallagher since they were nine years old — through funerals, first cars, and every hard year in between. So when Ted leads him to a quiet, off-limits deck on the last night of their cruise to point out dolphins in the dark water, Mike doesn't think twice about leaning over the rail.

He doesn't see the two hands that push him.

The ship doesn't stop. Nobody hears him scream. And somewhere behind him, his best friend walks back into the light to tell the woman they both love that Mike wandered off on his own — the first lie in a story Ted will spend the next five weeks perfecting.

What follows is a fight for survival on two fronts. Adrift and then marooned on an uncharted island, Mike has to relearn everything about staying alive — fire, water, shelter — with nothing but his hands and, eventually, a decades-old relic pulled from the wreckage of a WWII fighter plane he finds buried in the jungle. Back aboard the ship, Kathy Voss grieves the man she loves in the arms of the man who took him from her, all while quietly building a case Ted never sees coming.

Overboard is a story about the people we trust completely and the ones who prove we shouldn't — about what it costs to survive an ocean, and what it costs to survive a lie. As Mike claws his way back from the edge of everything, and Kathy closes in on the truth one careful thread at a time, the two halves of this story are racing toward the same unavoidable reckoning: a confrontation neither Ted, nor the reader, will see the full shape of until it's standing right in front of them.

A gripping, propulsive novel of friendship, obsession, and the long reach of the truth — for readers who loved the slow-burn tension of a survival thriller and the simmering betrayal of a psychological drama in equal measure.