No Man's Land

Boston, March 1990 During the St Patrick's Day revelries, thirteen priceless works of art - a Vermeer, Rembrandts, a Manet - are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. With no leads for the police to follow, it seems as though they've all but evaporated into a bleak New England night...

On the South Fork of Long Island - one hundred and fifty miles away - Jake Dealer is amongst the last of a three-hundred-year tradition of America's seafaring history. A fisherman born with an innate ability to read the Atlantic's unforgiving waters, from which he ekes out a living; his horizons defined only by his family and the ocean.

A plot put into motion in Boston - where money and power hold different meanings - will change the course of his life. And when, in the wake of a devastating tragedy, Jake is unwittingly ensnared in the greatest unsolved art theft in history, he's left fighting to cling on to the only certainties he has ever known.

A white-knuckle thriller and a haunting portrait of a disappearing American frontier, No Man's Land weaves together themes of survival, redemption and the brutal price of silence. Simon Gaul charts new territory in the American literary seascape, creating an indelible portrait of both a vanishing way of life and the depths of human resilience. Just how far will someone go to protect what matters most?

Simon Gaul, a businessman, writer and peripatetic traveller, has written numerous travel books, as well as the well-loved children's book Pushkin the Polar Bear. He has sailed nearly every ocean, driven from London to Beijing in 1990 before the USSR collapsed, and reported on that 55-day expedition for the Sunday Correspondent and Capital Radio. He has also been a freelance journalist for titles such as the Daily Telegraph and the Independent. Simon previously lived in London, where he owned The Travel Bookshop (of cinematic fame) in Notting Hill. Now, when not on the road, he calls the Bernese Oberland home.