I am not a boat person. I don’t like the rocking, the drifting, the loss of solid ground. When I agreed to my first sailboat ride with friends on the Chesapeake Bay one afternoon, I ended up throwing up over the side. It kind of killed the party.

So, reading a novel about a group of sailors in the middle of the ocean was a bit of a risk. The churning sea, the claustrophobic conditions, the smell of fish — it’s all there in the pages of The Night That Finds Us All. I didn’t get seasick this time, but it was quite the ride.

John Hornor Jacobs’ novel follows plucky Samantha Vines, a self-described “short, skinny, tattooed, buzzed white hair” sailor with a salty tongue and attitude who’s asked by an old pal to help deliver a 100-year-old sailboat from Seattle to England. It’s not the most appealing job in the world, and the crew includes people she has a complicated past with. But she’s down on her luck, has a bit of a drinking problem, and desperately needs money, so she’s not in a position to say no to the well-paying gig. Even if the boat is haunted. And even if Sam almost immediately starts getting, if not bad, then definitely weird vibes the moment she sets eyes on The Blackwatch.

Trouble starts soon after the crew sets off. Creepy voices in the walls, bizarre shadows, the feeling of somebody watching. One of Sam’s fellow crew members tells her, unironically, about the ship:

“It is a vessel for bad dreams. You will not sleep well here.”

She tries to blow it all off at first, but then she finds a strange old diary hidden in the ship’s library and begins to understand more of the vessel’s twisted history. When the crew starts disappearing, she can’t help but face the fact that something bad is going on. Something really bad. 

The book has a fine balance of suspense and humor that makes for a spooky, atmospheric read that never delves into anything too dark or depressing. Sam is scrappy and no-nonsense, and her way of looking at the world is in itself worth reading. She describes the sky as “inside-of-your-colon black”; she tells us the engine “devoured belts like old men eat black licorice”; and she says The Blackwatch sat in the dock next to the other boats like “an NFL lineman among toddlers.”

For the most part, the other characters are also well developed and interesting in their various eccentricities. Jacobs does a great job of giving them clever and distinguishing traits and habits. One flies a drone around in the hopes of going viral on his YouTube channel; another always eats alone; yet another tells the same jokes over and over. And, of course, they all curse like…yeah, you guessed it.

The book builds and crests like a wave, and the pacing kept me turning pages. The author has clearly done his research on the art (and drudgery) of sailing. In an introduction, Jacobs details how he himself became part of a crew delivering a yacht, and that experience lends authenticity to his writing about the crazy life at sea.

But for someone like me who doesn’t know my port from my starboard, I sometimes had trouble picturing or understanding the physical circumstances of where the characters were and what they were doing. There’s one key, highly dramatic moment in the middle of the book, for example, that didn’t pack the punch it could have because the logistics were lost on me. I had to stop reading and Google some things to figure out what just happened.

And while the mystery of what’s going on with The Blackwatch kept trying to deepen and build, the story struggled to find its sea legs at times. Intriguing plotlines would begin to swell but never gain momentum. A long, delightfully amusing scene with a quirky old sage promises to be a huge turning point in the narrative, yet it ultimately doesn’t have much impact. I wanted more: more from the diary entries; more understanding of the history and tragedy of the hulking ship that looms over these characters; and more about the complicated, churning fates that bring everyone their moment of reckoning. 

Still, The Night That Finds Us All is an impressive read that’s both eerie and tense. Despite some choppiness here and there, it’s a really fun ride.

Tara Laskowski is the author of the Agatha Award-winning novel The Weekend Retreat. She lives in Virginia.