Syd Stapleton packs a lot of truth into his newest fictional tale of Frank Tomasini and the Molly B.

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When last we met Frank Tomasini, he was living on an old wooden boat among the San Juan Islands working through an environmental disaster and cover-up wrapped in a whodunit. For the sequel our hero has traded the San Juans for the open ocean and a fishing troller for a barge, but the criminal behavior and Frank’s need to dig for the truth remain.

The Six Mile Circle: A Sea Story (2025) by Syd Stapleton continues the adventures of Frank Tomasini and the Molly B that we first met in Troubled Waters. Frank’s marine surveyor’s business has fallen on hard times because of the revenge exacted by one of the principals from the earlier story. To make ends meet, Frank has signed on as a deckhand and cook on ocean-going tugboats and barges making runs between the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. These barges are loaded with freight along with some unexpected cargo. When one of the hulls is mysteriously pumped out in the middle of the ocean, a fellow deckhand gets sick and ultimately dies after contact. Frank knows he has to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Several of the characters from Stapleton’s first novel return for the sequel. Besides Frank we have his live-in lover Carol Bogdanich, as their relationship moves into a more mature period; Frank’s long-time friend Harlan Brown; and Harlan’s new companion Agnes Middleton. Harlan—who is Frank’s best friend—was the former owner of Frank’s 1937 wooden salmon troller the Molly B. He restored the boat and is now taking care of it while Frank’s away for the long trips across the Pacific.

As deckhand/cook, Frank would be alternating, month-on, month-off with Annie Karp, a small but vigorous woman. When they first meet she wants to make sure Frank understands that, unlike the Alaska runs he trained on with his new employer, there were no stops along the way between the Northwest and Hawaii. She also warns him that the mate on his coming trip—Steve Rosset—was “an a**hole.” That proved to be an understatement.

Annie is on a trip when she’s enlisted to help pump what the skipper said was water that had leaked into a compartment of the hull of one of the barges. It turns out it is some “kind of smelly, cloudy sh*t” that sprays on Annie when a hose breaks free. Long story short, she is kept on the tugboat and instead of flying her home to the mainland once they reach Hawaii, the company insists they bring her back on the return trip. A few days later she has died in the hospital and the shipping company—a relatively new LLC with somewhat mysterious ties to agribusiness—works to keep it under wraps. Rosset seems to be the only one in the know.

In 245 pages, Frank works with Carol, Harlan, Agnes, several of the deckhands, and some environmental government agents and academics to uncover the truth behind the scheme. An unexpected and fast paced ending brings some measure of justice, but it also speaks to the enormity of the challenge. As one reviewer notes, the environmental crime Frank uncovers “mixes fiction with uncomfortable fact.” Although this is a work of fiction, Stapleton notes, “the facts and figures related to agricultural and other chemicals have been carefully researched, and they are not, sadly, fiction.”

The Six Mile Circle packs a lot of truth into this tale of greed, political corruption, and the ongoing degradation of the only earth we have.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of the Pacific Ocean by Robert Boston on Unsplash