Although he describes himself as "not a churchgoer", he sang in a church choir as a child and retains a strong moral sense along with a questioning, philosophical nature.

Initially somewhat naive, Adam unwisely trusts a beautiful young woman in The Arm of the Starfish, which results in the death of a friend.

The son of a physicist who teaches at Columbia University, Adam has been spending his summers with his family in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he has assisted elderly marine biologist "Old Doc" Didymus "ever since I was a kid".

Adam quotes William Shakespeare (especially from Hamlet) to Vicky in his letters and postcards, trying to obliquely warn her of the same kind of dangers that resulted in his uncle's murder a generation earlier.

When Vicky inadvertently runs afoul of soldiers and a drug kingpin from the fictional South American dictatorship of Vespugia, she is stranded on an iceberg, but Adam finds her.