Choppy Water, Jack Heath

There is no doubt that Jack Heath is a prolific author, and CHOPPY WATER is his latest (currently) standalone novel. In a style that's similar to previous books - the "Kill Your ... " and the Timothy Blake series in particular, it has all the thrills, spills, action and irony that you'd expect, with a touch of dry, dark humour. What you end up with is a heart stopping, and frequently moving, thriller with a believable scenario at it's core: a wanted and haunted man, looking to disappear, who finds himself working (he has an ulterior motive) on a cruise ship, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when other people start really, and very quietly, disappearing at the same time as a dead body shows up in a very bizarre manner. Someone who was definitely not a victim of the virus.

That body, a young woman horribly disfigured, is discovered in the housekeeping trolley of one Cesar Cain - a man who is not who he says he is, somebody with a bunch of reasons for not getting involved in any murder investigations. He's on this cruise ship as part of a plan to disappear, because if the cops find him, he's going to jail, and if the bikie group the Hell's Hounds find him, he's going to die.

It turns out that the the first woman is surprisingly hard to identify, given the locked room / closed community of a cruise ship. And yes - that was "first" as bodies do seem to be piling up - leading to a bit of fretting from some about the message of a serial killer onboard getting out at the same time that everybody's already dealing with the thought of a deadly virus spreading. But the initial death is gruesome, and the details are not for the weak of stomach. Cain is comfortably sanguine with a fair mount of gore though, as he finds himself sucked into a murder investigation because the head of ship security is desperate to write it off as an "accident", and Cain's having none of that. His reasons for the reluctance, and ultimate involvement, are gradually revealed as the story progresses - from a very confrontational prologue, through the death of that young woman on board, some disappearances, and some very weird behaviour and dodgy goings on - all while the stories of the deadly virus, and problems in finding somewhere for the ship to dock because of it, start to send a lot of passengers batshit crazy. 

There is a lot going on in CHOPPY WATER and readers who pay attention to the small things will be rewarded with some "I thought so moments". You can also refuse to sweat the little things, and charge through this as a rip roaring thriller that belts along at a great pace, twists, turns and pivots left right and centre, and covers a lot of ground for something that is taking place in a very confined location. The subplot around the pandemic panic does add touches of gallows humour, but really, the goings on - in both Cain's life and on the ship - are the main focus and there's less that should be funny in either of those, if you don't count the vicious "funny business" that is eventually unearthed. Turns out there's a lot of that, as there has been in Cain's past - funny and decidedly not funny. 

Tinged with a bit of romantic longing, with a hefty "ships that passed in the night" metaphor going on, there's even a close encounter with a shark which very nearly had me cheering in the middle of the night. There are hints at the end of this novel that there could be more to come in Cesar Cain's story - would be interesting to see where he doesn't disappear to next.