Helen Plum Library

A nineteenth-century tale of life aboard a New England whaling ship whose captain is obsessed with the pursuit of a large white whale

The Dunnes have set off on a ten day boat trip, a trip that hopefully will bring them closer together, despite the fact that the father, Stuart is staying behind on land. But only an hour into the trip they're already falling apart. The teenage daughter plans to drown herself, and the teenage boy is high on drugs. Ten-year-old Ernie is near catatonic. But their mother Anne, with the help of her brother-in-law Jeff, is insistent on pulling everyone...

"Annabelle Doll, Tiffany Funcraft, and their families journey far from home"--

As they hunt for a bunch of paintings worth a walloping half a billion dollars, Juan Cabrillo and the crew aboard the Oregon chance upon a much bigger problem. A Filipino rebel leader is not only using them to finance the insurgency but has discovered a drug developed yet never used by the Japanese during World War II that makes mega warriors of ordinary soldiers. Not so far-fetched given the revelations of Norman Ohler's recent Blitzed: Drugs in...

"Samuel Pipps is the greatest detective of his day...but now he's a prisoner, accused of an unknown crime by one of the world's most powerful men. Along with his faithful sidekick, Arent Hayes, they're sailing back to Amsterdam from the East Indies, where he'll stand trial. But no sooner are they out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage. Still shackled in his cell, Pipps sends Hayes to solve a mystery that connects every passenger on board....

The crew of the Oregon has just completed a top secret mission against Iran in the Persian Gulf, when they come across a cruise ship adrift in the sea. Hundreds of bodies litter its deck, and as ship captain Cabrillo tries to determine what happened, explosions rack the length of the ship. Barely able to escape with his own life and that of the liner's sole survivor, Cabrillo finds himself plunged into a mystery as intricate--and as perilous--as any...

The Volunteer, a nineteenth-century Yorkshire whaling ship, becomes the stage for a confrontation between brutal harpooner Henry Drax and ex-army surgeon Patrick Sumner, the ship's medic, during a violent, ill-fated voyage to the Arctic

"The only life Tress has known on her island home in an emerald-green ocean has been a simple one, with the simple pleasures of collecting cups brought by sailors from faraway lands and listening to stories told by her friend Charlie. But when his father takes him on a voyage to find a bride and disaster strikes, Tress must stow away on a ship and seek the Sorceress of the deadly Midnight Sea. Amid the spore oceans where pirates abound, can Tress...

Corsairs are pirates, and pirates come in many varieties. There are the pirates who fought in the sea off the Barbary Coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the contemporary pirates who infest the waters of Africa and Asia, and the pirates . . . who look like something else.
When the U.S. secretary of state’s plane crashes while bringing her to a summit meeting in Libya, the CIA, distrusting the Libyans, hire Cabrillo...

"Long before Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly came to the colourful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, young Surgeon-lieutenant O'Reilly answered the call of duty to serve in World War II. Fingal just wants to marry his beloved Deirdre and live happily ever after. First he must hone his skills at a British naval hospital before reporting back to the HMS Warspite, where, as a ship's doctor, he faces danger upon the high seas. With German bombers a constant...