Waves of Burden

Drew Jones is trying to scrape a life together. A long-time resident of San Diego County's foster care system, distrust, shock, and danger are all he's ever known. Now married, with a contracting business he's trying to get off the ground and a kid on the way, all he wants is enough for a down payment on a house and to know his family has the kind of security he could never have dreamed of.

But when his foster brother, Jake, a nomad van-lifer who never met a problem he couldn't run from, returns to town, the distrust, shock, and danger return with him.

After witnessing a convenience store robbery gone wrong, Drew assumes his foster brother has done what he's always done: run. But when cops begin poking around, followed by armed men threatening his family, Drew comes to understand what happened in that convenience store wasn't really random, and that his brother hasn't actually run.

Now, caught between his commitment to keep his growing family safe and his oldest bonds, Drew has to navigate a world he has no knowledge of, a world in which one false step could see his body washed up on one of San Diego's picturesque beaches, or lost forever beneath the waves.

In this shocking, mysterious, and deeply-felt novel, Anthony and Derringer Award-winning author Curtis Ippolito probes what, exactly, makes a family, and how much weight they can put on someone before they begin to sink.