The Book

Flat a Novel by Neal Rabin

A wise man once said, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” If this is true, then it stands to reason that Captain Lanning Delaford is about to have the most meaningful day of his life.

In Neal Rabin’s newest, action-packed novel, FLAT (Ponderosa Publishing, Spring 2024, ISBN: 978-0-997046830), Lanning Delaford is torn from his typical routine in 16th Century Spain by a series of comically unfortunate events. Thrown into a swashbuckling adventure he had no intention of taking, Delaford becomes a reluctant explorer.

Set at the tail end of the Spanish Inquisition, when seafaring exploration and discovery were THE thing, FLAT follows the intrepid tales of Delaford and his makeshift crew as they embark on a journey teeming with betrayal, romance, murder, sea battles, and a healthy dose of satirical Renaissance humor.

A part-time tennis instructor for the prince of Spain, part-time merchant seaman, Lanning lives a comfortable but financially precarious life in Andalusia. In the course of a single day, the fiscal scales tip out of his favor following a narrowly-escaped assassination attempt, a double mugging, and the loss of his loaner boat and its cargo to pirates. Now deep in the red, he has no choice but to rent another boat and make for the nearby trade port of Tangier to recover some of his losses.

As luck would have it, passage on Lanning’s ship is in high demand, so the captain and his eclectic crew soon set sail. Accompanied by an engaging and diverse cast of characters including Ignatius Loyola, Ferdinand Magellan, (mostly) evil pirates, a mediocre Portuguese butcher, an alluring, bad-ass courtesan, and a peregrine falcon named Doug, Lanning finds that his short trip to Tangier is about to become a life-changing, epic voyage into the unknown Great Sea.

Fraught with ruthless pirates, brutal storms, and worries about falling off the edge of the Earth, FLAT is a clever, cinematic odyssey. Neal Rabin has crafted a fast-paced piece of historical fiction that is at times both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny with a wit that readers of Douglas Adams or Christopher Moore will enjoy.

Faced with your own personal precipice, would fear stop you at the edge, or would you dare to venture beyond it?