Kling, Christine 1954-

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Kling, Christine 1954-

PERSONAL:

Born 1954, in Missoula, MT; divorced; children: one son. Education: Florida International University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Fort Lauderdale, FL. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Worked variously as a bookstore clerk, deck-hand, boat cook, windsurfing instructor, and charter boat operator. Broward County school system, Fort Lauderdale, FL, coordinator of magnet programs; Broward Community College, Fort Lauderale, adjunct professor of English, 2004—. Holds captain's license for one-hundred-ton auxiliary sail boats.

WRITINGS:

"SEYCHELLE SULLIVAN" SERIES; MYSTERY NOVELS

Surface Tension, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Cross Current, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Bitter End, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Wreckers' Key, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2007.

OTHER

Contributor to Miami Noir, Akashic Press (New, York, NY), 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including Cruising World, Motor Boating and Sailing, and Tiller and the Pen. Also author of blog, Talespinner.

SIDELIGHTS:

Christine Kling is an author whose experiences and life on the water well qualify her to write for boating magazines and to plot her books around the marine industry. Kling was born in Montana but grew up in Southern California, where she learned to sail and pilot boats. She spent a year in France as a foreign exchange student and was enrolled in many California colleges before completing her degree. She had always loved writing and published stories of her adventures, including those about her thousand-mile bicycle trip down the Baja California highway and crewing on a sailboat that traveled the South Pacific and to New Zealand.

Kling and her former husband spent three years building a fifty-five-foot sailing yacht that they then took through the Panama Canal to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. There they began a charter service, taking guests to the islands for two years before returning to the States and settling in Florida. They lived with their son on the waterways and canals around Fort Lauderdale from his birth in 1984 until 1993, when they again traveled to the Caribbean. They remained there for two years, and Kling began to write her first novel during this time. Soon after their return to Florida, the couple divorced, and Kling took a position as a teacher with the school system and completed Surface Tension.

The novel features Seychelle Sullivan, the skipper of the salvage boat Gorda, operating on the New River in Fort Lauderdale. A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that Kling "is surefooted whenever she's on deck or navigating Route A1A." Seychelle runs a towing and salvage operation she inherited from her father with her two brothers, both of whom, like her, were named after islands. One, however, wants her to sell the business so that he can pay his gambling debts. Years earlier, as a teen, Seychelle had a chance to save a life and did not respond, a decision that haunts her each time she answers a call from a distressed ship. When she receives a Mayday from Top Ten, the yacht skippered by her former boyfriend Neal Garret, she boards the drifting vessel, but finds only the body of a dead woman. Seychelle becomes a suspect, and her cottage is ransacked and her savings stolen. The yacht's owners are not who they seem to be, and as she tries to unravel the death and Neal's disappearance, she stumbles into a world of murder, vice, and the criminal underbelly of South Florida.

Booklist contributor Carrie Bissey appreciated the book's "nautical detail, interesting characters … [and] well-tangled plot." A Publishers Weekly reviewer who called the novel a "strong suspense debut," adding that Seychelle "is one of the genre's more unusual amateur sleuths, and Kling makes her one of its more endearing ones as well."

Seychelle returns in Cross Current. Once again she is skipper of the salvage ship Gorda, accompanied by B.J., her mechanic and sometime lover. When Seychelle discovers a swamped boat in the South Florida waters, she also finds a dead woman and a very frightened, very dehydrated, but very much alive girl named Solange. Solange is a Haitian refugee, and soon Seychelle is deeply involved in protecting her from trouble, including immigration officials who want to send her back to Haiti. Finding the girl's American father is key to saving her from deportation, but Seychelle quickly learns the difficulties in locating someone who does not want to be found. Even worse, murders among the local Haitian community and the presence of mysterious strangers convince Seychelle that Solange's life is in danger. As Seychelle struggles against the police and government agents who are determined to return the girl to Haiti, allies such as best friend and attorney Jeannie work to keep Solange safe. Among the turmoil, unanswered questions about her father and conflict with her wayward brother Pit make Seychelle's rescue mission even more complicated. Kling "writes with crisp assurance, especially about life in coastal South Florida, and her supporting cast, if crowded, is colorful," remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

Business and personal troubles plague Seychelle in Wrecker's Key, the fourth book in the series. Competitors in the salvage business are exploiting the advantage they enjoy through GPS technology, which Seychelle steadfastly refuses to adopt. A lawsuit by a disgruntled client has her questioning the wisdom of continuing in her seagoing business. When her friend Nestor Frias runs a millionaire's yacht aground, Seychelle suspects that there may be more to the incident than a simple navigational error. Nestor is later killed in a windsurfing accident, and his pregnant widow is convinced that he was murdered. Soon, Seychelle comes to believe his death was no accident, and she becomes embroiled in a dangerous case involving crime, murder, and piracy. A Publishers Weekly reviewer predicted that a "shocking resolution to this solid tale of nautical adventure will catch most readers by surprise."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2002, Carrie Bissey, review of Surface Tension, p. 63; September 1, 2004, David Wright, review of Cross Current, p. 69; February 1, 2007, David Pitt, review of Wreckers' Key, p. 35.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2002, review of Surface Tension, p. 1268.

Publishers Weekly, September 9, 2002, review of Surface Tension, p. 39; October 4, 2004, review of Cross Current, p. 71; January 29, 2007, review of Wreckers' Key, p. 44.