“Neighbors began peering through the gaping hole in the fence. Numerous radio transmissions squawked in the background on the police and fire channels. Captain Fertid climbed out of the pool and sat on the edge, taking deep breaths and watched as the young boy was wheeled out of the back yard toward the ambulance.”
– an excerpt from the book
ARPress is honored to publish Skeleton Crew Manhunt: A Blue Undertow Novel by Christopher Garraty. This book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARPress website.
Life rarely explodes all at once. It builds quietly; in small decisions, private loyalties, careless risks, and moments that seem harmless at the time. Then one day, everything collides. In Skeleton Crew Manhunt, those quiet choices stack up on both sides of the law, and what starts as routine slowly turns into something no one can fully control.
Author Christopher Garraty is a retired police officer from the Brigantine Police Department in New Jersey. He has written humor columns, radio commercials and has finished two novels. He has also completed several screenplays on varying subjects. A 40-minute episode based on the Blue Undertow novel was shot with award winning film producer Tony Picciotti.
Garraty drops readers into Greenlee like you’ve just walked into the station mid-shift. No dramatic spotlight. Just cops talking over coffee, arguing about promotional exams, pulling pranks that probably should’ve gotten them suspended years ago. The humor feels lived-in. The grudges feel old. Sergeant Morrow and his crew aren’t polished heroes; they’re sharp, flawed, loyal, and sometimes a little immature in the way people get after years on the job together.
Then there’s the other side of town.
The Skeleton Crew doesn’t begin as some elite criminal empire. They start out bold, a little reckless, testing their luck with lizard masks and fake guns. It almost feels absurd, until it works. Success feeds confidence. Confidence feeds escalation. Suddenly the masks get better. The weapons get real. The stakes climb.
What makes the book stick isn’t just the action. It’s the contrast. One chapter might have officers joking in a diner booth. The next throws them into a child drowning call or a fatal hit-and-run that changes the tone instantly. That’s the rhythm Garraty captures; the way real life flips without warning.
The writing doesn’t overreach. It doesn’t lecture. It lets the characters breathe, argue, mess up, and keep going. There’s politics inside the department. Favoritism that everyone sees but no one quite says out loud. Ambition simmering under the surface. And always that thin line between control and chaos.
By the time the manhunt tightens, it feels less like a simple cops-and-robbers story and more like a collision course set in motion long before anyone realized it. Everyone thinks they’re steering their own path. Everyone believes they’ve calculated the risk.
They haven’t.
And that’s what lingers after the last page; the sense that life, like Greenlee, keeps moving whether you’re ready or not.
Skeleton Crew Manhunt: A Blue Undertow Novel by Christopher Garraty is now available for purchase via the ARPress Bookstore.