Third and final instalment of Shawn McQueen Trilogy:
The story of three surfers: Brian Shafter, Scientist Harry Cook and surfboard shaper Shawn McQueen. Five years separating each of the three men and from vastly different backgrounds travel life's journey in search of the answer to life's ultimate question: What is the meaning of life? The book opens in the late 1940's:
Brian Shafter is the eldest of the three and a younger brother. A narcissistic, judgemental, evangelical misfit, with serious sexual orientation issues after being '
interfered
with'
on a church camping trip as a young boy. He will discover surfing late but soon begins to make a name for himself as small-wave stylist. He will fall in with a bad crowd, run afoul of the law and make a pact with God for not being caught. Riddled with guilt and unrequited love, he marries within his church, migrates to Australia to proselytise the gospel.
Five years his junior, Harry Cook is an only child who loses his beloved father to cancer and decides to dedicate his life to science to rid mankind of this scourge. A brilliant student, Harry accepts a study grant to head up a research team for a major agricultural chemical company. What Harry discovers will cause him to throw in his career and flee for his life because he's blown the whistle on the most carcinogenic chemical known to man and a plan for the multi-national company to eliminate all pollinators and force agriculture into a total dependence on their product. A fugitive from big-Ag thugs he flees. Shawn McQueen is the youngest surfer of the three, a philosophical, older brother and a bit of a surfing prodigy who will grow up to be a leading surfboard shaper and a pacifist who will move to Australia in the late sixties. Surfing is the bond between these three men who remain friends for decades as the years pass. Brian will become a huge surf retailer in Sydney, Australia, Shawn will become a gypsey surfboard shaper who will settle in Noosa and Harry will disappear at sea after the research vessel he is working on sinks mysteriously with all on board. Recently widowed, pacifist Shawn buil an ocean going catamaran, takes-out the world's most wanted terrorist, and follows a girl with sea-green eyes to the dusty mountains of Afghanistan to help her rebuild her broken country. After a time in-country he leaves the troubled Afghanistan and returns to Australia where he meets a surfing girl and falls in love again. Things are wonderful until the late nineties, when a mutating, specie-jumping virus quickly becomes the pandemic extinction event that will end all life on planet. As the extinction event quickly shuts down the planet, a terminally ill Harry mysteriously appears at the gate of Shawn's acreage outside of Noosa after years of being missing and presumed dead. The three men who have seen and experienced much will spend the last weeks of life on Earth discussing the meaning of life. Only one will reveal the absolute truth and emerge as the Holy Man. Will it be the proclaimed man of God? Will it be the scientist? Or will it be the philosophical surfboard shaper?
Who will be the Omega man who put the tools away and turn-off the lights for the last time?