There’s more than meets the eye in Boothbay resident Steven Hantzis’ sophomore book, “The Tide of Deception: Mystery on the Coast of Maine.” 

Part spy and science who-done-it with a dash of romance, the story follows Bigelow scientist and Boothbay native Sandy Arsenault as her obsession with an anomalous tide pulls her into a world beyond her imagination.

Along the way, Sandy’s life becomes complicated as she single-parents her 17-year-old daughter Caroline, crosses paths with a North Korean spy and forms an attachment to local Machinist Union president Brian Agosti. The book is available now.  

Novel writing was a new experience for Hantzis, whose previous work, “Rails of War,” was a narrative nonfiction homage to his father, who was a GI railroader in World War II. Crafting a realistic fictitious world was a challenge, but a fun one, Hantzis said. 

It helped that Hantzis drew upon real occurrences to inform the novel. The original draft started by examining the history of the region going back to the 1777 incident of Sir George Collier, captain of His Majesty’s Ship Rainbow and commodore of the Royal Navy’s forces in Halifax, who ended up stuck in Oven’s Mouth in Boothbay while chasing down a vessel carrying coveted ship masts. 

Collier squared off against the Sons of Liberty during the ordeal, but what interested Hantzis more was the local fishermen who Collier supposedly shanghaied into giving him directions.  

“The story leaves out what happened to the fishermen, and to me, that was where I wanted to jump off.”  

This unknown fisherman becomes Sandy’s ancestor in the novel. Meanwhile, the anomalous tide she’s chasing is also ripped right from the 2008 headlines, when local waters did go in and out about seven times rapidly in a short amount of time. 

Hantzis also let the calendar influence his work by pulling local happenings into the story’s timeline, such as the January 2024 storms that had him racing back from the airport to secure a float at his seasonal home in Barters Island, or graduation season at Boothbay Region High School. 

“There's a big element of Maine, not just in the storyline, but in the way of telling,” Hantzis explained. This applies not only to the mix of factual events and regional “lore” that shaped the narrative but the Maine editor and cover artist who helped create the finished product.  

Hantzis will be exploring local promotional events in the coming months.