Art grew up in Syracuse, New York, and spent summers at Selkirk Shores State Park on Lake Ontario. In 1974 he founded a retail business in Oswego NY, which continues. He's a respected competitive sailor with many seasons of racing experience in Lightnings and other types of sailboats, and a keen observer of wind and weather and their effect on the lake he loves. He writes character-driven adventure. The Secret Ever Keeps is his debut novel and the first in the Eastland series. The second, as yet to be named, is well advanced.

The Secret Ever Keeps:

When marine engineer Laurel Kingsford meets ninety-two year old ex-rumrunner Jake Eastland at his small hotel on the shore of Lake Ontario, the reader quickly learns – although she does not - that he is her grandfather. Jake’s stories of the Prohibition years capture her imagination. Enlivened by her interest, he brings her to the grave of his ancestor Joshua, where he reveals a family legend involving a storm, a shipwreck, and a lost treasure.

Laurel doesn’t believe a word, but when her search for a load of whisky abandoned in 1925 by Jake, who seems to enjoy having her address him as “Grampa Jake”, also turns up an old cannon on the lakebed, she changes her mind. She and Jake recruit diver Mike McCune. Foreword Magazine describes what follows as, “a high-seas thriller replete with...killer storms, sabotaged equipment, and a race-against-time quest for sunken treasure”.

Indeed, there are forces at work our heroes do not understand. A hidden enemy plots to kill Laurel, and deep in the cold dark water, unknown to anyone, awaits a centuries-old secret so powerful it will change the way America views a national hero.

If she can overcome her deep-set fear of the depths, wrest the secret from its hiding place, and find the key to unlock it, Laurel will prove her worth to the men she loves and at long last earn her legacy - the sense of belonging that’s always been missing from her life.

Check out Art Tirrell's exciting novel The Secret Ever Keeps.