New Summer Thriller, Requiem Shark, Swims into Waters Charted by Benchley’s Epic Shark Tale

BOULDER, Colo. - April 13, 2015 - PRLog -- When an old surfer is killed by a bull shark off the Florida coast, an odd collection of misfits is drawn to the beach where he died. The adventure on which they embark along Florida’s waterways—and their quest to find meaning in both the tragedy and their own wayward lives—dramatically unfold in W.E. Burnette’s summer action/adventure novel, Requiem Shark. The newly released page-turner is published by Outskirts Press.

Requiem Shark falls into the category of “shark book,” a one-book category that consists of Jaws. Peter Benchley published Jaws in 1974, and no one since has matched it. Writers have churned out bigger sharks, more sharks, prehistoric sharks, alien sharks—but none have matched the quintessential shark horror story Benchley penned.

Two decades after he wrote Jaws, Benchley wrote "The shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim; for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors." Requiem Shark is written in that spirit. It doesn't try to top Jaws. It departs from it in a logical direction—into our contemporary awareness of the importance of life in the sea, and into our much greater knowledge, accumulated over the 39 years since Jaws was published.

Where Benchley depicted the shark as “the other”—a being so completely alien that the only way we could understand it was to see it as evil incarnate—Requiem Shark explores the parallels between the shark and the people who pursue it—depicting those people as kindred apex predators who, like the shark, must struggle against forces larger than them.

The saga beings with the horrific death of an aged surfer, whose demise draws together a mismatched crew determined to capture the shark that killed him: two friends who served with him in Vietnam, two 30-something wildlife journalists drawn by the chance of a story to jumpstart their careers, and Kelli, a 17-year-old high-school dropout with an uncertain future, whose heroic attempt to take the shark’s victim away from it makes front-page news. Together they form an uneasy fellowship bent on revenge or redemption or renewal—none of them is sure which—and set out aboard a barely seaworthy 45-foot research vessel to hunt sharks.

The teen leads the unlikely crew on an odyssey down the Indian River Lagoon, westward on the Okeechobee Waterway, and onto a sun-blasted inland sea on the edge of the Everglades where they confront—in the form of the very shark that Kelli has already faced once—their pasts, their problems, and their destinies.

Requiem Shark is available online through Outskirts Press at www.outskirtspress.com/bookstore. The book is sold through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for a maximum trade discount in quantities of 10 or more, and is being aggressively promoted to appropriate markets with a focus on the fiction, action/adventure, and sea stories categories.

ISBN: 978-1-4787-4822-9          Format: 5.5 x 8.5 paperback cream          Retail: $15.95

ISBN: 978-1-4787-4021-6          Format: 6.14 x 9.21 hardback w/ jacket          Retail: $27.95

Kindle: $3.99          eBook: $5.00

Genre: FICTION / Action & Adventure / Sea Stories

For more information about Requiem Shark, visit the book page at the author’s webpage, www.OutskirtsPress.com/requiemshark.

About the Author: W.E. Burnette is the author of The Long Roll. He has been a soldier, a college teacher, and a marketing writer. A native of Bee Tree, North Carolina, he currently lives in Boulder Creek, California, works in Silicon Valley, and writes fiction in his spare time. For more information about W.E. Burnette, contact the author at weburnette@gmail.com.

About Outskirts Press, Inc.: Outskirts Press offers full-service, custom self-publishing and book marketing services for authors seeking a cost-effective, fast, and flexible way to publish and distribute their books worldwide while retaining all their rights and full creative control. Available for authors globally at www.outskirtspress.com and located on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, Outskirts Press, Inc. represents the future of book publishing, today.