The Passenger

The claustrophobic confines of a German submarine provide the setting for this less than successful supernatural thriller from Tallis (The Voices). Somewhere in the North Atlantic during WWII, Kapitänleutnant Siegfried Lorenz, the commander of U-330, surfaces his vessel amid some ice floes. He and his crew witness an eerie sight—a raft with two corpses, one frozen upright, their features eaten away by gulls. Meanwhile, the SS orders Lorenz to Iceland to take custody of two prisoners: a British naval officer, Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence Sutherland, and a Norwegian academic, Bjørnar Grimstad. They succeed in getting the two men aboard, but en route to Brest the Englishman somehow gets hold of a gun and takes both his life and that of his fellow captive. After the bloodshed, Lorenz, a dutiful officer in the tradition of Das Boot, finds himself haunted by visions of the dead. After the intriguing premise, the book falls short, with genuine scares few and far between. [em]Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.). (Feb.) [/em]