3.  Madeleine L’Engle, Arm of the Starfish (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux   1965).

In this novel, L’Engle (a Newberry-award winning novelist who is also known for her Christian reflective writing) first introduced Adam Eddington (who recurs in several of her Austin family chronicles).  In this story, though, Adam is charged with the safe-keeping of Poly O’Keefe (the heroine of her own “series” of books).  When things go wrong and Poly is kidnapped, Adam has to figure out whom to trust and whom not to.  His choices are confused by his attraction to a beautiful young woman named Carolyn, “Kali” for short, whose father seems to be working against the O’Keefe’s.  Suffice it to say that Kali ends up having a too-close-encounter with a shark, a fitting consequence for her actions in the novel.