Forced into bitter and boring retirement solely because of advancing age, world-renowned architect Victor Harding retreats to his bucolic lakefront estate, a majestic house once owned by notorious Chicago gangster Bugsy Moran.

He soon learns that his idyllic dream home is a house with astonishing secrets.

After a series of family catastrophes and devastating financial setbacks, and now struggling to support his fractured family and hold on to his beloved house, Victor finds himself sucked into a life of crime. Trapped in a dangerous alliance with the treacherous leader of a local crime gang, he desperately seeks a way out.

Then Bugsy Moran’s legacy reveals startling surprises which thrust Victor Harding’s life into increasingly bizarre and ever more dangerous directions.

A gold standard in more ways than one...

In this smart and stylish psychological thriller, the first in the Victor Harding Adventure Series by award-winning novelist Douglas Richardson, readers are pulled into the Harding family's life of high crimes and misdemeanors, well as the colorful characters' efforts to stay one step ahead of their pursuers...and stay alive.

When they meet on beautiful, extradition-free Cape Verde, Victor Harding and Alva Batek just want to enjoy retirement and put their colorful criminal pasts behind them. But when revenge-seeking crime victims threaten their lives at Alva’s luxurious Cape Verde retreat, their peaceful plans are shattered. Victor and Alva plan a great escape—an exciting Caribbean ocean adventure on a sixty-foot yacht, relying on Victor’s deep sailing skills and the hope of new bonds among long-estranged family members invited on the voyage.

Their careful plans go wildly awry when a Venezuelan drug cartel’s fleet of modern narco-subs is decimated by rival cartels and they fall back on an old cocaine-trafficking tactic: hijacking a sailboat.

Victor and Alva’s sailboat.

As their sea cruise spirals out of control, the family is ensnared in a deadly battle for survival with a charming Irish hijacker, a sociopathic cartel boss, rebellious mercenaries, and a series of life-threatening catastrophes that test the family’s wits and courage. For fans of action-packed thrillers spiced with wit and plenty of twists, Sea Cruise is a riveting voyage.