Isle of Ithaca

This novel follows the adventures of a young man, John Wells, introduced in the author’s novel, Texoma. John was an orphan living in Gibraltar when he was taken in by the principal character of that story and her husband, Karen and Rory O’Rourke, and was being raised on a farm in Ireland when he was offered the chance to become a crewmember on a charter sailboat, the Charm of Christi, owned by Karen’s friend, Joan Cooke. While sailing in the Mediterraean Sea, John twice saved the life of a beautiful young Greek woman, Sophia Pappas, who had become one of the heirs of a shipping company upon the murder of her parents. While John was a crewmember on the Charm of Christi, charter services involved the collecting of plants having medicinal value on several islands for an Egyptian man who becomes Joan’s husband, the transport of visitors and others to several exotic places, the recovery of artifacts from an ancient shipwreck, and additional adventures. The theft and recovery of that boat and the lives of several crewmembers are woven into the story. Described are travels in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, by friends and associates of Joan, to take food and medicine to Berber tribes. Those individuals also become engaged in the study of a cave of historic importance and the development of that cave as a tourist attraction, an expansion of a principal character’s inland tourist business in southern Spain. John becomes deeply involved in Sophia’s family business. That leads him to the captaincy of a large yacht owned by Sophia’s grandfather, the recovery of a hijacked oil tanker, land development in Cyrus, and an important role in the business. John and Sophia fall in love, marry, and honeymoon at a family home on the Isle of Ithaca.