Commander Penn Fuller, USN, comes from a family whose tradition of service in the U.S. Navy stretches back two centuries. He was a deep-water sailor who loved the sea and his life in the Navy. Combat in Iraq, however, left him with a distinguished record, but damaged physically and mentally. Gone to ground at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, he tries to make the best of his situation by pursuing a doctoral degree and publishing a book on Naval river operations during the Iraq war. The doctorate and the distinctions he’s earned, however, offer no redemption. For him they're just hollow credentials that cannot comfort, heal or vindicate anything he's done, and cannot return him to the way he was before the war. Post-traumatic stress, intermittent physical pain, and self-doubt overshadow everything he does. He buries his feelings in work, despises his own self-pity and wants, above everything, to meet that someone who’ll be the focus of his life and help restore him to what he was. Harriet, grand-aunt and doyenne of the family repeatedly tries to engage him with women she thinks will help his career. One of them, Kate Hobson, comes close, but it’s not until Penn Fuller researches the shadowy life and career of his Great-grandfather, Vice-Admiral John Pennington, that he discovers long-hidden truths about his ancestry and also finds the love that will bring him the salvation he seeks. Penn’s journey of discovery takes him from Annapolis to Vermont to Japan and the revelation of family and official secrets that change his life and color historical events with the unique contributions of an ancestor whose sense of honor and life-long commitment to the woman he loved overcame vast distances of location, time and culture.
