Pauline Rowson talks about the tough and resourceful Art Marvik, featured in her new crime series

Former Royal Marine Commando, Special Boat Services Officer, Art Marvik is tough, highly trained, fearless, intelligent and fit.  Injuries inflicted while in combat have forced him to leave the Marines and seek a new life in Civvy Street. He thought he’d be able to adjust and carve out a new career for himself 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 failed on his first mission in civilian life, and Silent Running, the first in the Marvik series, opens with him reeling from it. 

Soon though he is launched on a new and dangerous career working as an undercover investigator for the UK's National Intelligence Marine Squad (NIMS) headed by Detective Superintendent Crowder. Marvik is aided in his investigations by his former Royal Marine colleague, communications, surveillance and IT expert, amputee, Shaun Strathen.

Marvik’s task is to go in comparatively cold to an investigation. Crowder gives him the barest information even though he knows more. But Marvik’s role is to ask questions, to stir up trouble, to provoke a killer into the open and to risk his life in doing so. Marvik is no stranger to staring death in the face.  He’s been doing it all his adult life. 

His biggest fear is being injured and incapacitated, being weak and having to rely on others. Fiercely independent and resilient since the age of seventeen when his parents - his mother a renowned marine archaeologist and his father an equally renowned oceanographer- were killed in a underwater explosion in the Straits of Malacca. Marvik’s family became the Marines.  Now that family has gone. He and Shaun Strathen are casualties of conflict. 

Marvik knows the sea intimately having spent much of his life on and under it. His missions for the National Intelligence Marine Squad (NIMS) take him across the Solent and along the south coast of England, forcing him out of his isolation in his remote cottage on the Isle of Wight and as the missions increase so too does the danger to him personally.  But Marvik is smart and tough. He can operate outside the law and does so because the job demands it. He’s not always right though. He makes mistakes, he misjudges people.  Sometimes the consequences are shocking and disturbing.

When an innocent girl gets killed, during Marvik’s second mission for NIMS (Dangerous Cargo) Marvik blames himself for not protecting her. Then a house fire almost claims his life and that of another girl, and Marvik believes it’s connected with the mission.  Only when Crowder drops the bombshell that Marvik’s parents’ deaths were not an accident but murder, does Marvik embark on a new mission and his most deadly one to date - to find the truth behind his parents deaths in 1997.

The Art Marvik series has been hailed as having all the hallmarks of the Rowson brand - a troubled hero, the setting and atmosphere, the sailing and boats, interesting characters, and the intricate, complex plots. "Action fans need Marvik on their radar." Booklist



There are twelve novels in the DI Andy Horton crime series, two standalone crime novels, In Cold Daylight and In For The Kill, as well as two crime novels featuring Art Marvik, Silent Running and Dangerous Cargo published by Severn House. 













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