Writing at the intersection
of care, evidence, and
imagination.

The Deep Blue Horizon · Book 1 of 6

Sinking Blue

By Julie Renee

First Edition · 2026

Dr. Cordelia "Lia" Merrick lives a quiet life on Bonaire, engineering advanced marine AI by night and running dive trips for trauma survivors by day. She has built a perfect cage of solitude three hundred feet above the ocean floor.

Then the Navy calls. Her father, legendary SEAL Murdock Merrick, was killed in an underwater explosion off Venezuela. The official story is impossible, and Lia knows it. The fluid dynamics do not work. The cover-up is sloppy.

Grief takes her apart until a retired Canadian police officer shows up uninvited and forces her back into the water. But when a staged gear failure nearly kills him at seventy feet, Lia recognizes the signature of someone who knows exactly what they are doing.

Her father was murdered. The people who did it are still out there, moving product through the Cariaco Trench.

Lia has a secret underwater server farm, a network of hydro-acoustic sensors, and nothing left to lose. The cartel just made a noise in her ocean.

She will answer.

Deep Blue Horizon · Book 2 of 6

Black Water Current

By Julie Renee

First Edition · 2026

Dr. Cordelia "Lia" Merrick has spent two years tracking the rogue petro-syndicate that killed her father. Now she finally has a lead: a fortified transshipment hub in Willemstad, Curaçao, where stolen Venezuelan crude and cocaine flow through a single air-gapped terminal.

To reach the syndicate's true prize — the subterranean extraction hub Sector Delta-9, buried in the Cariaco Trench — Lia must first steal the blueprints. That means going where no satellite can see and no sonar can hear.

Operation False Safety: a deep sub-surface infiltration using custom rebreathers, diver propulsion vehicles, and bio-mimetic drones. Lia and her cell — the tech-savvy Echo, the demolitions expert Anvil, and the reckless but brilliant diver Gato — slip beneath the waves to clone the syndicate's most guarded secrets from inside a cooling water channel.

They escape. They celebrate. Then the Coral Network AI processes the stolen data and delivers a gut-shot: the accident that nearly killed their teammate Timmy was no accident. And the coordinates that led to Murdock Merrick's death were leaked by someone inside Lia's own team.

Now, with trust shattered and retaliation coming, Lia must decide who to save — and who to bury.

Deep Blue Horizon · Book 3 of 6

Pressure Gradient

By Julie Renee

First Edition · 2026

The map is a kill box. The network is hunting them. And the weakest link is sitting right behind a steel door.

Hours after the Curaçao heist, Dr. Cordelia "Lia" Merrick and her crew are running completely blacked-out across the Caribbean, clinging to survival inside a 38-foot Fountain Lightning. But their stolen intelligence is already obsolete. Elena Rostova, the Red Falcon Syndicate’s ruthless cyber-commander, has detected the breach and shifted the entire Aegis-Grid, turning every frequency, coordinate, and safe corridor into a trap.

With experimental blue-laser optics failing and polymorphic malware eating their AI cluster from the inside, the crew is forced into a desperate run toward the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Paria. Every acoustic ping from Commander Valerius Vance's patrols tests the limits of their stealth technology, while inside the cargo hold's Faraday locker, Timmy’s ticking clock marks a betrayal no one saw coming.

As trust fractures and the digital walls cave in, Lia must push her technology—and her crew—to the absolute edge. In a world where one wrong frequency means a watery grave, the only way out is straight through the pressure gradient.

Pressure Gradient is a relentless techno-thriller of electronic warfare, underwater surveillance, and the kind of high-stakes survival that gets you killed when you're wrong.

Deep Blue Horizon · Book 4 of 6

The Bends of Justice

By Julie Renee

First Edition · 2026

Dr. Cordelia 'Lia' Merrick knows the Red Falcon Syndicate killed her father. What she doesn't know is who helped them do it.

Operation Ghost-Siphon is her answer. A midnight infiltration of the Dragon's Maw Terminal, a floating fortress of laundered cash anchored in the Gulf of Paria. Lia and her team will swim through a sea-chest cooling pipe against hurricane-force suction, breach an air-gapped server room, and drain $420 million in encrypted ledger capital from the syndicate's financial spine.

The heist is flawless. The money is gone. But the cloned data files hold something she never expected: a biometric dossier labeled PROJECT POSEIDON: POST-MORTEM.

Inside it, a voice recording. Her teammate Timmy. Trading her father's Navy SEAL coordinates to syndicate director Elena Rostova. Bargaining with a killer to bury an internal affairs investigation into his own corruption.

The man who helped murder her father has been eating at her table, running her communications, and calling her friend for the entire operation.

Now he is locked in a Faraday isolation cell. Elena Rostova knows where they are. And Lia is about to discover that the real mission has only just begun.

Deep Blue Horizon · Book 5 of 6

Deep Blue Horizon: Cariaco Trench Warfare

By Julie Renee

Dr. Cordelia 'Lia' Merrick thought she knew the shape of betrayal. Then Timmy—her father's protégé, her own trusted tech—turned her network inside out for the Red Falcon Syndicate.

Now Lia and her team are back on Bonaire, bleeding from that wound. Before they can stitch it shut, the Syndicate's mercenary arm, Escuadrón Negro, seizes the local donkey sanctuary. Twelve hostages. A twelve-hour ultimatum. And an electronic jamming blanket that turns the island into a dead zone.

Lia refuses to negotiate. Instead, she goes underground—through volcanic lava tubes older than the Syndicate itself—and takes back what was stolen.

But the real prize lies deeper. Thirteen hundred meters down in the anoxic black of the Cariaco Trench, the Syndicate is drilling through a geological nightmare to extract something they shouldn't have. Lia will pilot a one-person atmospheric diving suit into that toxic dark, evade automated crawlers and magnetic traps, and collapse the wellhead on top of their operation.

She's coming for the bunker on Chacachacare Island.

And she's bringing the abyss with her.

Deep Blue Horizon · Book 6 of 6

Deep Blue Horizon: Poseidon’s Wake

By Julie Renee

The Red Falcon Syndicate runs the world from four thousand meters down.

Dr. Cordelia "Lia" Merrick and her partner Marcus let themselves be captured. It was the only way inside. Their disabled submersible sinks into the syndicate's subterranean staging terminal beneath the Cariaco Trench, and they walk into the lair of Director Elena Rostova—a woman who has never lost a game.

But Lia and Marcus are not playing to win. They are playing to burn it all down.

Before capture, their team planted a silver diagnostic bridge. Now, as Rostova tries to pry information from Lia's mind and buries Marcus in the lower vaults, a non-linear cognitive virus begins to spread through the syndicate's global data architecture. Automated defenses fail. The trench foundation groans. And in the chaos, Lia slips her restraints to reunite with Marcus in the distribution wells.

Their escape triggers a catastrophic chain reaction. Rostova chooses to drown in her collapsing gallery. Lia and Marcus launch an emergency dive pod into a hurricane. Above, their chase crew fights the storm to haul them aboard.

One flash memory array. One final upload. The syndicate's tracking grid dies forever—and Lia and Marcus step into a silent, analog dawn.

Poseidon’s Wake is a deep-sea thriller about trust, sacrifice, and the cost of cutting the cord.