2013 Winner Independent Publisher Book Awards (bronze medal) for best eBook fiction.
One of the tragic bits of historical information in A Cape May Diamond, is reference to a massive storm that devastated the town of Cape May in 1962 (13 years before the story takes place). They called that storm the High-Five. Here is an excerpt from A Cape May Diamond about that storm with photos of the devastation.
"They all remembered it. How could they forget the Ash Wednesday
nor'easter of 1962, one of the worst storms of the century? They described it
to Tom as the storm where the ocean met the bay. It was that bad."
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| Where the Ocean met the bay |
"The
forecasters hadn’t thought it would amount to much when it first appeared on
the radar. They said it would blow through with minimal impact, but they were
wrong. An unusual combination of weather patterns coinciding with the Spring
equinox caused it to stall in the mid-Atlantic for almost three days where it
pounded coastal areas with continuous rain, high winds, and tidal surges, and
dumped large quantities of snow inland for several hundred miles. Cape May went
through five record high tides during that storm, and so it came to be called
the High-Five."
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| Aerial photo of one of the five record high tides |
"The seawall that ran the length of Beach Avenue had
been a boardwalk back then, dating back to the late 1800s, but the High-Five
lifted it off its moorings like so much kindling and tossed it into the center
of town, damaging everything in its path."
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| The boardwalk |
"Beach Avenue collapsed when the storm
pulled the sand out from under it, leaving behind craters filled with abandoned
cars and chunks of concrete that the angry unrelenting sea picked up and hurled
into the buildings along the strip. Very few escaped nature’s fury in that High-Five
of 1962 when the ocean met the bay."
 |
| Beach Ave |
"Many saw the High-Five as the beginning of the
end. Some money trickled in afterwards. The roads were repaired with federal
disaster relief money. They built the seawall. The salvageable buildings were
shored up and the ones destroyed were bulldozed, but the town was never the
same after that. The High-Five had washed away the quaintness from Cape May,
and people just gave up. Many left for good, boarding up and abandoning their
homes. Insurance companies pulled out, leaving the Dew and everyone else along
Beach Avenue at the mercy of the sea."
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| Ocean Avenue |
I invite you to sample the book at Amazon. Here are the links. Thanks!
A Cape May Diamond
Genre: Literary Fiction/Mystery
Published: September, 2012
