Desperation Moon
Fourteen-year-old Paige Radoslaw is watching her brother surf from the Huntington Beach Pier as a big man named Gundry is watching her along with a wispy weasel of  a man named Rice. Paige’s father is software billionaire Cyril Radoslaw and the watchers are out on this sunny-bright day to kidnap his children.Finished surfing, twelve-year-old Peter joins his sister on the pier. Rice lures them down the beach, says he wants to see some of the paintings the surfers have decorated the beach wall with. Gundry shows up with a van. There’s a struggle, Peter gets away, but Paige is captured. She’s taken to a ramshackle shack in the middle of an oil field in central California along with another kidnap victim, seven-year-old Kelly Hackett. Paige engineers an escape and she and Kelly take off at a full run into the middle of a dark oil field and minutes later the kidnappers are hot on their trail.DESPERATION MOON is the debut novel for writing sailor Ken Douglas. It’s a fast paced thriller that drips tension from every page as you race along with worry about the two girls, kidnapped by a depraved psycho and his slow witted, malichious partner. Douglas writes suspense like no other and somehow he manages to put his helpless characters into the most desperate of situations. You know the kind, just when things can’t get any worse, they do. Then they get still worse.