Thirteen in the water. Seven make the raft. Only three come home.
When the super-yacht Anassa sinks in the South Pacific with no hole, no mayday, and no trace, the world assumes a tragic accident. On the liferaft, there are eighty-four water sachets, a broken service tie that says no one has been inside since Auckland, and seven survivors: billionaire Gideon Hale, his wife Margot, their eighteen-year-old son Leo, their daughter Tessa, and three others.
Four of them will die of dehydration over twelve days, even though nineteen sachets are recovered unopened, flattened and folded.
Someone poisoned the water.
One carton. Twenty-one sachets. Dosed with furosemide to make you thirstier the more you drink. Designed to leave one father and one son alone long enough for a $100M Liechtenstein trust to pay out - a trust that only pays for a surviving issue of the body, with genetic proof required.
Margot finds the stepped crimp on day two. She doesn't say a word. She starts choosing which hand gets which sachet.
The Billionaire's Lifeboat is a survival thriller about marriage, arithmetic, and how far a mother will go when she realizes rescue isn't the most dangerous thing on the raft.
