Every Place in Uncharted Horizon Series Books Is Real. So Is the Reason I Wrote Them.

There's a scene in Beneath Mediterranean Skies — Book Two of the Uncharted Horizons Series — where Lance and Olivia spend a day in Naples with a private driver. He takes them through Pompeii with a local history teacher as their guide. Up the slopes of Mount Vesuvius to a winery, where they sit on a terrace eating a five-course meal with wine pairings while the countryside stretches out below them. Then to the crater itself, in the rain, the weather having turned on them completely.

On the drive back through the city, the driver clips a microphone to his sun visor and starts singing karaoke. Turns out he'd been in a boy band when he was younger. He's actually good. They end the day at his favorite donut spot — not a tourist place, just his spot — before he drops them back at the ship.

That day is in the novel because it happened to us.

My wife and I have been traveling together since 1992. The same year I took my first cruise. Over thirty years, we've sailed the Caribbean, Alaska, the British Isles, and the Mediterranean. We've walked through Pompeii with a private guide who was a schoolteacher the rest of the year and knew the ruins like a second home. We've sat in that winery on Vesuvius. We've been in that rain at the crater. We've heard that man sing.

Nothing in these books is invented geography or imagined atmosphere. Every port, every excursion, every moment of place is drawn from somewhere we actually stood.

That's not a marketing claim. It's the reason the series exists.

What the Series Is

The Uncharted Horizons Series follows Lance and Olivia across five cruises — five books — from a first unexpected meeting in the Caribbean to a wedding in Bermuda. It's a slow-burn romance, which means it doesn't rush. It earns each step.

Olivia Carter is a widow. Two years out from losing her husband, still living quietly inside a life that stopped asking anything of her. When her friends talk her into a last-minute Caribbean cruise, she goes mostly because she runs out of reasons not to. She's not looking for anything. She's barely looking at all.

Lance Donovan is calm in a way that tends to unsettle people who aren't. He doesn't chase. He doesn't perform. He simply makes space, and waits to see what steps into it.

They meet on that first cruise — wrong cabin, wrong moment, entirely unprepared — and something starts that neither of them has a name for yet.

The series tracks what happens next, book by book, destination by destination. Each voyage deepens what's between them and tests what hasn't yet been resolved. The Caribbean gives way to the Mediterranean, then the British Isles, Alaska, and finally Bermuda. Each place does something different to them — pulls something forward, surfaces something hidden, demands something neither one was ready to offer.

That's what travel actually does, if you let it.

Why Every Location Matters

I made a rule for myself when I started writing this series.

Travel is never the point. It's always the pressure.

Every location in these books was chosen because of what it does to the relationship, not because it's beautiful (though it usually is). Naples is chaos and energy and the particular kind of intimacy that comes from being lost together in a city that doesn't slow down for you. The crater of Vesuvius in the rain is about deciding whether to keep going when conditions aren't what you expected. Santorini, where the almost-kiss happens, is the most visually stunning place we've ever been — and also the place where vulnerability felt closest to the surface.

In Book One, set in the Southern Caribbean, there's a moment in St. Lucia that my wife and I still talk about. We were on a mountain road when we came across a roadside shack — nothing planned, nothing on any itinerary. A stone wall overlook, the kind of view that stops you mid-sentence. And beside the shack, a makeshift oven built from a 55-gallon drum, with bread inside it. Pulled out fresh right in front of us, warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. A garden that felt more like a secret than a destination. A rum distillery, a buggy ride through the countryside, a jazz club in the evening. Things that don't show up in brochures because they don't photograph easily — they have to be experienced.

Those things are in the book because we were there. Because I watched my wife's face in that moment and knew it had to go somewhere.

Sometimes I wonder if she would have liked me to be a little more like Lance.

The Dedication Says Everything

Both books are dedicated to my wife. Not as a formality.

She is my travel partner since 1992. She's been in every port that appears in this series. She's sat across from me at the tables where these conversations happen. She was there when I found the Naples driver, when we rented a houseboat on a canal in Amsterdam the night before a British Isles cruise, when we watched glaciers calve in Alaska and drove the road from Anchorage to Seward before our ship ever left the dock.

The acknowledgments in Love, Uncharted say it plainly: many of the cruises, destinations, and moments in this novel were inspired by travels my wife and I have shared together.

What it doesn't say is that writing them was a way of making permanent something that started as just the two of us, somewhere out on the water, paying attention.

What Kind of Reader This Is For

This series is written for adults who have lived enough to want something emotionally real.

Not manufactured tension that resolves in a chapter. Not love interests who exist only to be obstacles. Not the version of romance where healing is simple and connection is effortless.

Olivia is a widow learning to want things again. That doesn't happen quickly or cleanly. Lance is steady, but being steady isn't the same as being simple — and the series makes that clear as it goes. There's a first conversation. A first touch. A first time one of them says something true. A first argument that matters. These things are spaced across five books because that's the pace at which they actually happen in real lives.

If you've read a lot of romance and found it too easy, this might be the series for you. If you've traveled and understand what it does to you when you're somewhere unfamiliar with someone who's starting to matter, this will feel familiar in the right ways.

The Books

Book One — Love, Uncharted The Caribbean. A wrong cabin, a first conversation, a beginning that neither of them planned for.

Book Two — Beneath Mediterranean Skies is coming Fall 2026. Italy, Greece, Crete, Turkey. The almost-kiss. The first moment either of them admits, even to themselves, that this might be something real.

Books Three through Five are in development — the British Isles, Alaska, and the Bermuda wedding that closes the story and opens the next one.

If you want to know when each book arrives, join the mailing list. No noise, just the things that matter.

One last thing.

I've been on enough cruises to know that the ship is never really the destination. It's the frame. What happens inside it — between people, between places, between the version of yourself you arrived as and the one you are by the time you disembark — that's what you remember.

These books exist because of thirty years of paying attention to that. Because my wife and I kept showing up in places that changed us, and I eventually needed somewhere to put all of it.

I hope you find something in them worth the trip.

KJB Alan