Lost Voyage: An Art Marvik Thriller

Rowson’s convoluted third Art Marvik thriller (after 2016’s Dangerous Cargo) finds the former Royal Marine commando, now an undercover investigator for the U.K.’s National Intelligence Marine Squad, on his boat anchored off the Isle of Wight, drinking a beer and ruminating on his past. When he gets a call for help from Helen Shannan, a young woman whose sister’s murder he investigated in 2015’s Silent Running, he motors to Eastborne, where he meets her at the marina. Helen tells him that she overheard what sounded like a conversation about a murder between two men on a boat right after she left her boss, who had just fired her for refusing to have sex with him. Doubtful of her story, he accompanies her back to her flat, where they discover the bloodied, lifeless body of her former boss. Rather than report the crime to the police, Marvik decides to spirit Helen away and solve the murder himself. One revelation leads to another, and soon Marvik is caught up in a mystery concerning a ship lost at sea several years earlier, with his boss and assorted scoundrels putting in their oars and muddying the waters. Rowson relies too often on convenient coincidences and creakily contrived plot devices. (Nov.)