Ron Tew: counts it great fortune Mississippi’s largest bank holding company made the offer he couldn’t refuse. After selling the bank, he trashed a collection of useless stuff and moved aboard his sailboat. During the next four years, he and wife Jeanne logged 25,000 nautical miles under sail. A career in banking and experiences at sea provide a rich diversity of characters and plots. “Sailors, like fishermen and farmers, will lie,” Tew said, “but it makes the denouement a lot more fun.” He and his wife now make their home in Pensacola, Florida.
BOOKS
The Rich Man and the Thief:
Fired from his job because of erratic behavior, David Warren fixates on the bank’s refusal to increase the company’s credit limit as the cause of his downfall. Angry and desperate for money, he sees robbing the bank as fitting payback. With his newly acquired wealth secure in the stock market, David vacations at a sailing school in the Virgin Islands owned by Billy Sebren, the bank’s wealthy CEO. Liking the lifestyle and learning the training yacht is for sale, David robs another branch of the same bank in order to purchase the boat. When the Sebrens figure out who robbed the bank and used the money to buy their boat, Billy and wife Katie fly to the Virgin Islands, intent on finding David and recovering their property and the bank’s money. For Billy Sebren, the hunt is now personal.
The Conversion
: Jackson Rhodes, a quiet, self-assured clinical psychologist, agrees to accompany Nat Arrington, a boisterous, womanizing attorney with political aspirations, to Ft. Lauderdale to bring the 40-foot sailing yacht Nat has purchased to Pensacola. An unseasonable cold front produces a powerful squall on their second night in the Gulf, and Nat is thrown overboard, leaving Jackson to cope with terrifying winds and seas. His survival depends on logical thinking, self-control, and the timely intervention of a beautiful marine biologist. Rescued from physical peril, Jackson finds his ordered world in a different turmoil as he struggles to reconcile newly awakened emotions with strongly held moral and ethical standards.
The Second Flood
: In 2016, the Antarctic Ice Cap slides into the ocean, caused by a combination of global warming and a shifting of continental tectonic plates. Prior to the catastrophe, two brilliant engineers, Jerry Miller and Hal Jernigan, had built Hebron, a high-tech, self-sufficient village on the Tennessee River. When a shrimp boat racing ahead of the rising waters from the Gulf of Mexico reaches Hebron, they see a way to reach Chicago, our country’s new capital, with a survival plan for the nation. Members of Congress are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, the government is in chaos, and President Woodrow Wolfe has fallen under the influence of a televangelist who convinces him Armageddon is at hand. In his confusion, Wolfe views the masses streaming into Chicago seeking aid as the enemy. Miller and Jernigan find themselves in an explosive confrontation, with America’s future dependent on the outcome.
Danger in the Wake
: (Middle grades/young adult) Competitive sailboat racing team John Sebren, 16, and his 14 year old sister Jessie set out to sail a 41-foot ketch owned by their father's charter company from the Dominican Republic to the Virgin Islands. The teens are smart and highly competitive, and in planning their adventure, they anticipate every eventuality except one -- piracy. A disgruntled former charter company employee learns of their plans and recruits two thugs to assist in kidnapping the kids. Knowing the sailboat cannot outdistance the power boat in pursuit, John and Jessie pull every trick to outsmart them, even sailing directly into a vicious storm in the middle of the night, only to be caught after all. Though unarmed, the teens are not what the pirates expect. In the words on one of them, "These ain't no ordinary kids."
The Love of Wisdom
: Phil Koontz is confronted with the quest of truth and wisdom when an encounter with a deer at night forces his car into a ditch. His wife goes through the windshield and is left in a state of profound unconsciousness. Months later, Phil learns his mother is dealing with his father’s early stages of dementia. As a positive gesture, his daughter introduces him to Sophie, a lady Methodist minister who for several years has moderated a series of discussions on contemporary issues. Missing the lively talks and debate he used to have with his wife, Phil signs up for the seminar, which includes speakers and group discussion on the primary issues of conservative politics: abortion, gay marriage, global economics, plus climate change, war, poverty, fundamental religious beliefs and the decline of culture in modern civilization. The make-up of the group is varied, and the subject matter assures provocative and sometimes heated discussions. The reader, like the workshop participants, is guaranteed a new perspective on issues of interest to him or her.
Hold the Goat: The third time I stepped over Everett’s body to get to the copy machine, it occurred to me that what I was feeling might be stress. With this opening sentence, Tew sends his readers on an adventure with a couple facing burnout that provides a belly laugh a page. Gavin Bryant, award winning copy writer and account executive for a large advertising agency, acts on his dream of moving to an uninhabited tropical island to escape the pressures of corporate life. He takes with him Linda Arrington, head of marketing for his largest client, forbidden fruit as long as they worked together. A tiki hut home, their own beach and a boat to get to the nearest large island for provisions and other necessities are all the two need until family members come visiting, as well as live aboard cruisers and customers of a nearby sailboat charter company. The book moves rapidly through a series of humorous vignettes involving Gavin’s troublesome mother-in-law, her second daughter, pot-smoking Rastafarian carpenters, erotic Haitian dancers and a cosmopolitan assortment of visiting boaters, all of whom create both work and tension for Gavin and Linda. Paradise becomes crowded pretty quickly, and Gavin is left to wonder where he misplaced Eden.
Idle Ramblings (And Other Tales)
: A collection of short stories makes sense for a writer who grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, the oldest town on the Mississippi River and a setting rife with history and wild stories. Throw in several years living aboard a sailboat participating in island tiki bar tales lubricated by rounds of rum punch, and the idea for Ramblings was born. This collection is eclectic in that the essay subjects range from war to religion and the short stories from the serious to the absurd. As a product of the deep South, where the ultimate compliment is to be referred to as 'a good ole boy', my stories represent the attitudes, the humor and the experiences of one so blessed.