Dangerous Cargo

July 25, 2016
The south coast of England and its waters provide the main backdrop for Rowson’s disappointing second contemporary mystery featuring former Royal Marine commando Art Marvik (after 2015’s Silent Running). At a church in Dorset, Marvik and his former Marine buddy Shaun Strathen attend the funeral of Bradley Pulford, who appeared in the area in 1989, worked as a fisherman, fathered a child, and then went missing in 1991. The problem is, Pulford died in 1959. So who was impersonating him? Full of bitterness over his unhappy upbringing and nagging regrets for failed responsibilities, Marvik slogs through an exhausting series of mistaken identities and governmental and corporate finagling related to a number of deaths. More murder and mayhem follow, some of it performed by Marvik himself. Rowson relies heavily on exploring Marvik’s psyche through gobbets of internal monologue and interspersed historical passages that too often read like reference material, slowing the momentum of what otherwise might have been a marginally exciting plot-driven waterborne thriller.

July 1, 2016
Ex-commando Art Marvik (Silent Running, 2015) tracks down the killer of a man who died twice.DNA evidence shows that the body washed up on the Isle of Wight belonged to Bradley Pulford, who had worked for fishermen Adam and Matthew Killbeck before vanishing in 1990 . But according to Detective Superintendent Philip Crowder of the National Intelligence Marine Squad, Pulford died in Singapore in 1959 in an accident aboard the freighter Leonora. So Crowder sends Marvik, along with fellow former Marine Shaun Strathen, to investigate the connection between the Killbecks, a Dorset fishing family, and a seaman killed in Asia. The trail is immediately complicated by Sarah Redburn, who's looking for her father, Oscar, a marine archaeologist who disappeared from the Dorset coast in 1979 while looking for fossils. A picture shows Oscar with a group of students rallying in support of a local dockworkers' strike--a group that includes Bradley Pulford. When Sarah is killed the morning after meeting Marvik, his antennae begin to quiver. And when Sarah's roommate, actress Bryony Darrow, is burned out of her house on London's Eel Pie Island, the ex-Marine goes full-throttle against a gang of villains as ruthless as they are deadly. The investigator's second outing is even more muscular than his debut, as Rowson edges her detective puzzles ever closer to thriller territory.

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September 15, 2016
Rowson's superhero, Art Marvik, returns in another pulse-pounding adventure. This time he and his partner, Shaun Strathen, are tasked with unraveling the mystery of why Bradley Pulford, declared dead decades ago, is now being buried by his family in a small town on the Dorset coast. Pulford was known to local fishermen Matthew and Adam Killbeck, but they seem as mystified as Marvik about who the dead man, who was fished out of the sea in an unrecognizable state, might be. But when a young woman who claims she knew Marvik's parents and who's been sniffing around the case, is murdered, Marvik realizes something is definitely up. That something turns out to date back to the British occupation of Malaysia, and its effects are potentially explosive. With a plethora of characters it's sometimes difficult to track, the plot starts slowly but ramps up quickly, delivering more than enough action to keep adrenaline junkies reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)