The Alpha Male by Doyle McKim

About the book

The Alpha Male is the story of a man who spirals to primal behavior and is hanged by his shipmates who stand trial for the act.

Rawling Harris, skipper of a modern offshore yacht, awaits verdict in a Honolulu holding cell. In a grasp at straws he retraces the circumstances that saw him there.

Memories take him to the beginning of the voyage on Puget Sound. Forest and Joni Radmaker are the yacht owners. Forest is the brother of Rawling's wife, lost to cancer a year prior. Joni is new to Forest and to sailing.

Crew members include Granville Smith, Marigold Hunter, and Eric Westhagen. Rawling is impressed with Eric. Joni sees Marigold as a windfall for Rawling who accepts her as a friend and watch mate but nothing more.

Joni exhibits a distaste for sailing during sea trials but shows grit with a sudden turn of attitude. To compensate for lack of sailing ability, she insists on serving as chef. She loves attention. As the voyage takes them south, she goes topless and flirts with Eric who becomes aggressive. She rejects him. Forest is lost overboard and his body recovered with signs of murder done. The voyage is finished; they turn for Hawaii.

Eric is restrained below but spirals deeper into primal behavior and breaks free time and again in efforts to seize the vessel. He takes Joni as hostage, he wounds Granville, destroys means to navigate, and nearly garrotes Rawling to death. Finally, bound in cable, he uses a terminal infection to draw victims near. It leaves no recourse but the rope.

With emotional support from Marigold, Rawling finds Hawaii where federal agents reject the story that Forest and Eric were lost in a hurricane that passed.

Joni agrees to stand as witness for prosecution in exchange for immunity.

Rawling makes bail. He and Marigold complete a relationship that had but one ending. Trial date arrives. Rawling is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. While he is held in city jail, he hears inmates complain of saltpeter in the food. The light dawns. He tells his attorney where to find a packet of Joni's spice blend. It proves to be a mixture of Viagra and anabolic steroids.

Faced with the evidence, Joni confesses and implicates Granville who told her that, with the help of steroids, Eric could be seduced to kill Forest. He had not! He had only turned primal. Granville had killed Forest. They had continued to feed Eric the drugs so he would appear guilty and affect his own death. Rawling had hanged an innocent man!

Rawling's sentence is overturned. Marigold's strength, love, and wisdom free his heart of guilt.

As surviving relative, he inherits Forest's assets. He and Marigold are free to sail where they please.

About the author

Doyle McKim will tell you that he is drawn to water. It drew him from his birthplace in Iowa to the shores of Puget Sound. It interrupted his college career and set him off the coast of Korea. It called him to Seattle where he raised two sons and taught them to sail.

When the boys reached their teens, the three hoisted the main for a two year voyage through the South Pacific and the harbors and reefs of Austraila. Back once more on Puget Sound, he made his boat his home, and other boats his livelilhood. He rigged them, he sold them, he delivered them across oceans and down inland waterways, and he wrote about them.

After a time he remarried. His wife suggested he should finish his education. He did, on water's edge at Lake Washington Voc Tech and was accepted as a teacher there. He wrote freelance, then as a stringer for Sail magazine out of Boston. He served on assignments, local and foreign. Magazines in Germany and the Philippines picked up his work. He sat as interim editor for Waterlines in Seattle before he moved his home across the sound to Bainbridge Island and taught at Olympic College in Bremerton.

After eighteen years of life aboard he moved ashore where he lives in the house he built, a short drive to the waters of Puget Sound. He continues to write of boating and teaches at the local college in Centralia, Washington, where he started.