Third in the Daring Heights series is once more for rugged outdoors folks, this time with a kayaking expedition to start. Mighty whales and heavy weather are only part of the picture. Marin Reyes, the tour guide, is taking plankton samples for biology studies -- and doing some research of her own.

Readers of the series to date will recall Jake Ingles and Joshua Chandler, so now we meet the third guy from their computer science class at Harvard. Sam Pradzynski is fascinated by Marin and delighted by a one-to-one kayaking tour. He can afford it, and he's fit from his rock climbing trips. But he realizes that the Latin American beauty is not only skilled at martial arts, she's hiding some activities. The company she keeps on islands is shady, the information she seeks likely to get her killed. In fact, Marin is intent on breaking into the compound of a slave trader, who stole her two siblings years ago. Sam runs his own security firm, but she doesn't want any help.

As someone who does not know the Canadian coasts and islands mentioned, I had to Google the locations. Sidney is not far from Vancouver, which is separated from Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula by the stretches of water so scenically described. (Also north of Forks, home of TWILIGHT, which accounts for some of the weather.) Apart from that I could almost hike and paddle around there myself, given the detail in this story. To start with, the two characters have individual tents, of course, but once they end up sharing a tent you know which way the romance is headed.

This is an adult romance with a great deal of mutual respect and mutual support. I did think it was coincidental that Sam's firm is into finding the lost, rather than database architecture or something. But it's a novel. By the end, it's a thriller. Author Madelon Smid lives by a lake in Saskatchewan, so presumably gets plenty of kayaking practice, and she brings both people and places to life with great realism and character. If you have not read CLIMBING HIGH and HIGH GROUND, you have a treat in store. While HIGH SEAS can be read as a standalone, it perfectly complements the earlier adventures.