Dr. Jack Scales, hotshot neurosurgeon, is at the peak of his career--and his family's showing the strain. His wife, Arlen, is having an affair; Ric, their twenty-year-old son, hears voices urging him to violence; and teenaged Haley, a champion swimmer, would rather be anywhere than on a cruise to Bermuda in her family's luxurious new sailboat...
The Scales's bon voyage party ends in the death of a stowaway, a lightning storm that nearly sinks them, and one of Ric's worst schizophrenic episodes yet. Still, battling the elements together, the family forges a fragile unity...until a man adrift on a plastic beach float hundreds of miles from land springs a trap. Held hostage by smugglers who'll stop at nothing to get their cargo to port, the family faces the ultimate question: How much would each one be willing to sacrifice in order to buy the others a chance to survive?