Randall S. Peffer

Randall Peffer is the author of twelve nonfiction books and ten romantic suspense novels. His book Watermen (Johns Hopkins) is a documentary of the lives of the Chesapeake’s fishermen. It won the Baltimore Sun’s Critic’s Choice award and was Maryland Book of the Year. His novel Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues was a Lambda Award finalist. His recent book Where Divers Dare: The Hunt for the Last U-boat (Penguin Random House) debuted as one of Amazon’s “Hot New Reads.” Peffer's latest novel (2023) Forever Barcelona is a love story set against a season of bullfighting in Barcelona and Pamplona. The novel is an out growth of his award-winning National Geographic feature "Catalonia: Spain's Country Within a Country." In 2023 he also published Windward Passage with photographer Steve Jost and designer Ron Geisman, The book is a large-format history and tribute to the legendary maxi racing yacht of the same name. Peffer’s nonfiction narrative Never to Return co-authored with Robert Nersasian (Lyons Press) launched in the fall of 2017 and has a perfect five-star rating on Amazon. Never to Return is the harrowing tale of the torpedoing and sinking of a Coast Guard destroyer escort and the loss of 171 Coast Guardsmen off the coast of Iceland during WWII—the worst wartime disaster in U.S. Coast Guard history. Lyons Press launched Dangerous Shallows: In Search of the Ghost Ships of Cape Cod in 2020, a book Peffer co-authored with the highly-respected deep-wreck diver Eric Takakjian. Peffer has published over 350 travel/lifestyle features for magazines like National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Reader’s Digest, Travel Holiday, Islands, Yankee, Sail, and Wooden Boat. His travel features have appeared in most U.S. major metro dailies, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, San Francisco Examiner, and Los Angeles Times. The son of a career naval officer, Peffer holds a 100-ton master’s license and has logged over 100,000 miles at sea, mostly in traditional working vessels. He has been the captain of the research schooner Sarah Abbot for thirty-eight years.