Thunder Island (1999)

Meryl Sawyer's romantic suspense novel, a Zebra Books paperback original first printed in December 1999, is set in Key West. Jennifer Whitmore, a K-9 search and rescue expert, arrives for a training seminar on antiterrorism to find that her instructor is Kyle Parker, the man she has tried to forget since they were teenagers; a storm, the resort called Thunder Island and a murder for which Jennifer becomes the prime suspect follow. (Open Library)

Watches

Breitling (unidentified model): Kyle Parker, a former SEAL, joins Jennifer Whitmore and her dog Sadie in the search for a missing child, Holly Block. The compass on his Breitling tells him the girl's trail is still arcing left into worse terrain, and at a channel he taps the watch and tells Jennifer it picks up signals from the nearest satellite, a kind of GPS, before entering the coordinates into his laptop (p. 107). The watch glows in the dark when he wonders about the hour (p. 283), and near the end he gives Jennifer a second, military watch whose tab will make his Breitling vibrate (pp. 359 to 360). The satellite and signalling functions are as the novel gives them. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: The compass on his Breitling watch told him that the child was still arcing to the left, but moving into even more treacherous terrain. (Meryl Sawyer, Thunder Island, scan cataloged as Zebra Books (Kensington), 1999, p. 106; Internet Archive scan OCR)