On a pleasure cruise in the Pacific, seventeen-year-old Susannah, her parents, seventeen-year-old cousin Martin, and eighteen-year-old crew member Axel face off against seventeen-year-old Jeremy, a drug lord's son, and hired killers Elwood and fifteen-year-old Shako.

"The African Queen tells the story of Rose Sayer, a respectable missionary who is in Africa with her brother the Reverend Samuel Sayer, and Charles Alnutt the hard-bitten and disreputable skipper of the African Queen. Upon the death of her brother the pair become the unlikeliest of allies as marooned in German Central Africa during the First World War, they fight their ramshacle old launch, laden with explosives, downriver to strike a blow for England"...

Dicey struggles to make a go of a boatbuilding business while facing family concerns, romantic problems, and the uncertainties of a drifter who offers to help her in her work.

In their father's absence, thirteen-year-old September and her younger brother Ivan disobey his orders by taking the boat out on their Alaska bay, where they are caught in a terrifying storm called a williwaw.