FOLD AND DIE

A sea cruise is just what the doctor didn’t order for First Class Investigation’s lead detective.

Not much can lure Jordan Lacey from her beloved seaside home in Latching. But her at-long-last love DI James has been posted to chilly Yorkshire, and her landlord’s about to cancel the lease on her side-by-side bedsits. So a trip to the land of the midnight sun aboard MV Orpheus Odyssey, with a boatload of money thrown in, sounds nice. Of course she needs to serve as bodyguard for spoiled, capricious Joanna Carter, who’s convinced someone is out to trim her sails. But the job seems mainly to entail watching her wealthy employer cruise shipboard bars and accompanying Joanna on spectacular excursions through Norway’s fjords—at least until someone straps Joanna to the Double O’s keel, sending her into an unshakable trance. Ship’s doctor Max Russell helps locate a Thai nurse named Suna to babysit the catatonic woman while Jordan scours the ship for clues. But when Joanna and Suna both vanish, Max starts getting hinky on Jordan. Security officer Geoff Berry, who still has a grudge against Jordan from their days together on the Sussex force, is looking for any excuse to clap her in the brig. And even though her old friend Francis Guilbert is on board and staff captain Hamish Duncan is at her service, when the going gets tough, it’s James and only James that Jordan wants.

Despite some rough sailing, virtue triumphs satisfyingly in Jordan’s ninth (Turn and Die, 2007, etc.).