The Author
Wes Gruver
Certified scuba instructor. U.S. Navy veteran. First-time novelist.
WG
Author photo coming soon
Wes Gruver has been diving since before most of his students were born. He's a certified PADI scuba instructor with over thirty years of experience in the water, a U.S. Navy veteran, and a longtime presence in the Florida Keys dive community. He has certified more than a thousand recreational divers — which means he's spent a lot of time watching people learn to trust the water.
The Cass Mercer Mystery Series is his first fiction. The diving expertise in these books is genuinely his own — not researched secondhand, but earned over decades of teaching, diving, and paying attention to the details that separate a good dive from a bad one. The wrecks are real. The reefs are real. The technical details are accurate. The murders are invented.
He lives in the Florida Keys.
Why a mystery series?
The Keys have a particular quality — they feel unhurried and open, but the dive community is small enough that everyone knows everyone's business. That combination of apparent openness and genuine insularity felt like the right setting for a mystery. And Cass Mercer is the kind of character who notices things that other people miss — which is a useful trait in a diver and an inconvenient one when the thing she notices is that a death doesn't add up.
Get in touch
The best way to stay connected is through the reader list. You'll hear about launch dates, behind-the-scenes notes, and the occasional piece of Keys diving lore.