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My New Novel: Count to Six Hundred
A week after publishing A Sea Without Witnesses, I’ve released my second novel, Count to Six Hundred.
It’s a different kind of book. The first was set on the open ocean. This one stays ashore, on a quiet stretch of wealthy waterfront in New England called Larkspur Point, where everyone knows their neighbours, or thinks they do.
The story
In June, Grant and Nina Calloway arrive on the Point with a Bentley, a seventy-foot yacht called Second Chance, and a story. Grant says he made his fortune in the stock market. Now he buys up small family businesses whose owners are retiring, and he’s letting a few lucky neighbours invest alongside him. The returns are eighteen percent a year, paid like clockwork.
Across the road lives Evelyn Ashford. She has spent her whole married life on the Point, and nobody knows her family’s money ran out years ago. She knows a fraud when she sees one. She also knows Grant Calloway may be her last chance.
On the last night of summer, the Calloways throw a party aboard Second Chance. By morning, police divers are recovering a body from beneath the dock.
Why I wrote it
I spend a lot of time thinking about money: how markets work, how wealth is built, and how quickly it can disappear. One thing that always fascinates me is that most financial frauds don’t succeed because people are stupid. They succeed because people want the story to be true. A steady, generous return from a confident, likeable person is exactly what a worried retiree or an overstretched family hopes to hear.
Count to Six Hundred is about that wanting. It’s about appearances, about what people will overlook to protect them, and about the debts, financial and otherwise, that always come due.
And because I can’t seem to write a book without one, there’s a boat at the centre of it.
Get a copy
Count to Six Hundred is out now in hardcover: 321 pages, published 14 October 2026.
If you read it, I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach me at office@aaronvinodjohn.com.