The Art Marvik mystery thrillers, gripping, fast-paced, action-packed

What makes Art Marvik tick?

Marvik's life changed when at the age of eleven in 1991 he was sent to boarding school in England by his parents, Professor Dan Coulter a renowned oceanographer and Dr Eerika Marvik an equally renowned marine archeologist. Prior to that Marvik had travelled the world with them on their research vessel where he was home taught. He viewed his dismissal as abandonment and their deaths in 1997 from an underwater earth tremour while diving in the Straits of Malacca with anger which lay buried deep within him. As soon as he was seventeen he enlisted in the Royal Marines and put his parents, their life and their wealth behind him. Langton, the psychiatrist who treated him after a head injury sustained in combat, said Marvik was running away from his emotions, maybe he was, but as far as he was concerned he would continue running, the past was the past, except he begins to find on his dismissal from the Marines because of his injuries that the past has a nasty habit of catching up with you.

Marvik is very much an action-man, fearless, fit but with a deep-seated vulnerability. In Civy Street he's like a fish out of water. He thought he’d be able to adjust and carve out a new career for himself, preferably on the sea, but his first job as a private maritime security operative goes very wrong when the luxury motor cruiser he was travelling on and had been detailed to guard, gets attacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean, and Marvik finds himself with a bullet in his shoulder and the boat’s owner dead. He’d failed on his first mission in civilian life, and the first in the series SILENT RUNNING opens with him reeling from it.

Marvik has isolated himself in a remote cottage on the Isle of Wight uncertain of the future for the first time in his life. Lacking in confidence, hesitant and adrift he despises himself for being so weak. Even when a former marine colleague, Special Services Intelligence Officer, Shaun Strathen, renews Marvik’s acquaintance and asks for his help to locate a missing research scientist, Marvik fails to find him in a ruined cottage on the Isle of Wight coast. Strathen has also been injured in combat in Afghanistan and has been invalided out of the marines. He’s set himself up as a specialist security consultant to businesses and even with a prosthetic leg seems to have adjusted to life better than Marvik. Sick of himself Marvik returns on his motorboat to his rented cottage only to find he has a visitor, a former girlfriend and a navy nurse, Charlotte Churley, who insists she’s being followed. Marvik is ready to dismiss this as a symptom of overwork until Charlotte goes missing. Then Marvik finds he has the chance to work undercover for the UK's Police National Intelligence Marine Squad on dangerous assignments, which he relishes but there's still that itch that needs to be scratched. How can he lay his parents ghosts to rest and move forward?

About Pauline Rowson

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