In a month that’s seen the media buzzing about this summer’s big box office epic, “Homer’s Odyssey,” comes Friday’s publication of “Last Day on the Blue Wonder,” a novel in which a modern-day Odysseus — an American Afghan vet named Andy Herring, longs for home and the love of a good woman — but finds the journey fraught, not with mythic divine demons, but demons nonetheless.
Home for Andy is not, of course, a mythical island kingdom, but it is an island, the very real island of Gloucester, where his recently deceased father’s beloved tuna boat, Blue Wonder, sits in the harbor waiting for Andy to captain it back out to sea.
This, and a classic star-crossed love affair, keeps this battle-weary Afghan vet on high battle alert and lets author Les Carroll, an Afghan vet like Andy, show his readers why, through his 28 years in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard, he became an award-winning military journalist and acclaimed documentary filmmaker.
When Carroll is writing about battles, either in Afghanistan where he served two deployments, or later, on the Blue Wonder, he is on top of his game.
Retired now, Carroll says he has made it his mission to tell the stories of those who’ve served, and those who’ve fallen in service. His documentary, “Bringing the Fallen Home,” aired nationally in 2024, and his filmmaking experience shows in the way he gets us into his story and moves the action along cinematically with lots of quick editing.
This is Carroll’s third novel, and although his hometown is in South Carolina, he’s set Andy’s hometown in Gloucester because, he says, like his fellow veterans of war, the fishing community “understands what it is to go out each day to do battle … and what it means to find hope — and home — after trauma.”
It didn’t hurt that Gloucester was the home of his favorite TV show, “Wicked Tuna,” and Gloucester’s “Wicked Tuna” captains’ have received national acclaim for their work with the Wounded Warrior Project. That, says Carroll, is what first hooked him on visiting America’s oldest seaport.
That was in 2023, when he spent a few days “chasing ‘Wicked Tuna’ boats,” whale watching, people watching, eating fresh catch, and realizing, he says, “I had to come back, I had to set my next novel in Gloucester.”
Here, last summer, he would make a connection that was, he says, crucial to the writing of “Blue Wonder,” with none other than “Wicked Tuna” Capt. Bob Cook of the Fat Tuna. They were only gone for a day charter, says Carroll, but journalist that he is, Carroll spent that day taking copious notes of everything that goes into landing a big bluefin tuna — and poured it onto the pages of his novel in a scene reminiscent of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”
In a forward to the book, Cook, who appears by name in the novel, in fact compares Carroll’s “heart-pounding” writing to Hemingway. And, as Hemingway was famous for doing, Carroll drafted much of his book while sitting at a restaurant table.
“I made the Gloucester House Blue Collar my home base,” Carroll says, and not just for the lobster. Here, soaking up the waterfront’s vibe and characters, he channeled it and them directly onto the pages of his novel.
In the same forward, Cook, formerly of Beverly and now an Essex resident, refers to the book’s “classic love story.” Again with shades of Hemingway, it is a story that begins on a battlefield with a gravely injured soldier and a nurse, in this case, Amanda, a former combat medic who is not just central to the novel, but the heart and soul of it, having saved Andy from almost certain death.
The course of true love does not run smoothly for Andy and Amanda, however, and this provides Carroll’s readers with lots of high drama, action and confounding mystery, all of which leads to a nail-biting finale. But no spoilers here.
Suffice it to say, “Last Day on the Blue Wonder” explores the “lasting effects of war, the challenges of rebuilding a life after service, and the healing power” of a community like Gloucester.
“Everyone who visits Gloucester feels it,” says Carroll. “For me, it provided the perfect location for a story about courage, romance, survival, and second chances.”