Hatteras Light

First novelist Gerard obviously has great affection for the lore of the seafaring people of Hatteras Island off the coast of North Carolina, but this historical fiction about lighthouse keepers and sailors threatened by a German U-boat toward the end of World War I is just a mediocre sea adventure whose passionate figures are like watered-down Thomas Hardy characters. After an initial sighting, dismissed as improbable by the villagers, the insular Hatteras community is shocked by the sinking of an American ship by the German vessel. Readers must believe that a small naval craft is the only ship President Wilson's entire armed forces would spare to challenge an enemy submarine operating just yards from the American shore. Between the first encounter and the final face-off with the U-boat, a sailor and his son drift unrescued in a disabled fishing boat, romances criss-cross, and the islanders resent the Yankee skipper of the submarine chaser. Perhaps this work could have been sharpened into a boy's adventure. (October 15)