Death on Ice (eBook)

R. O. Thorp (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-38659-8 (ISBN)

Infos

A scientist nobody liked has been murdered on the Arctic ice . . . 'A brilliant modern cosy.' Ian Moore, author of Death and Croissants 'Fun ahoy!' Orlando Murrin, author of Knife Skills for Beginners 'How can something so damn cold be so damn cosy?' Oskar Jensen, author of Helle and Death 'Clever, quirky and irresistibly fun.' Jessica Bull, author of Jane Austen Investigates Meet the Blanchard twins: Rose is practical, sharp, and protective. Specialty: manta rays. Finn is too sweet and kind for his own good. Specialty: sharks. Rose and Finn are looking for sharks on the sea bed. When they return to their ship, the Dauphin, they make a terrible discovery: their colleague has been murdered on the ice - with a harpoon that should never have been there. Everyone else on the luxury cruise ship - the wealthy passengers, the researchers hard at work, the tight-knit crew and their strangely calm Captain - were all aboard at the time, so they are all under suspicion. Rose and Finn were the only two at sea, and they're miles from anywhere, so it's up to them to investigate. On scientific problems, they are a brilliant team - but can the Blanchard twins solve a murder? 'Crisp and cosy . . . like Murder She Wrote in the Arctic with sharks!!!' Kitty Murphy, author of Death in Heels READERS LOVE DEATH ON ICE: 'Think Christie but funnier, with more heart . . . I love a cosy murder mystery and this was one of the best.' ????? 'Delicious.' ????? 'Kept me guessing right to the end . . . I particularly enjoyed the diversity of the characters - it was done in a way which didn't feel tokenistic like some books can do.' ????? 'I loved this book.' ????

R. O. Thorp is an Australian living in Cork, Ireland, where she writes lyrics and herds cats. She was one of the Observer's top 10 debut novelists of 2021, and her writing has won the London Short Story Award and been shortlisted for the BBC Opening Lines Prize. Death on Ice is her first foray into murder mysteries.

Textauszug

4

The first full day of the trip dawned bright and gritty in the tooth-parts if you left your mouth open enough to the wind; icy spicules were coming off the tops of waves. They were powering north on the Dauphin’s elegant, emissions-friendly, morbidly quiet engines.

The ship had departed in the late evening, and this was the first time Rose had had the opportunity to examine what she’d actually be working with. After breakfast in the mess below deck with the crew – mercifully, they were to be separated from the paying guests most of the time – she and Finn investigated their workstation in the laboratory, which was clearly designed by a person who had met and conversed with at least one scientist. It was clean, surrounded by accessible power sockets, and made of materials that could be easily wiped if covered in fish guts. Rose, who was used to doing her work on half a counter or the ship floor, was deeply pleased.

It was a happy morning. She and Finn spent a good amount of time doing what you always did on the beginning of a research boat trip, which was figure out all the ways in which your precious equipment could be damaged, bludgeoned or nicked, and plot to thwart them. (Other people had different procedures, she understood, but this was overall a superior one.) She wedged their four horribly expensive underwater cameras into a nest of foam, bubble wrap and packing tape inside a lockable drawer, while Finn hovered, thinking up new and extravagant possibilities for damage. The boxes were, they eventually decided between them, secured against giant waves, thievery, somebody falling with their full weight from most angles, floods and rats. (If there were rats on this sort of ship, Rose thought, they’d probably ignore standard fare in favour of obscure and costly electrical cable, so it was a perfectly fair risk assessment.)

‘Shall we check on the submersible?’ said Finn at last, vibrating gently with excitement. Rose could barely contain herself either.

The dives in the Dauphin’s little submersible vessel were what Finn, and by extension she, was there for: to lay four camera-traps to peer in on the habitats of the Greenland shark, one of the longest-lived animals in the natural kingdom. Some specimens happily floated in sub-zero waters for hundreds of years. It was an extraordinary opportunity, and the potential rewards were mighty. Good, clear results would be satisfying for Rose, but they’d launch Finn’s research career with the force of a moon rocket. Cosmetic companies were devoutly following Finn’s research, as were some tech billionaires in San Francisco and Hong Kong who were giving an unseemly amount of attention to the potential for immortality. If you were willing to bob in polar-grey nothingness in a deep freeze and expend perhaps one neural connection’s worth of thought a week, Rose felt like telling them, living forever would be easy. The Greenland shark was notoriously elusive; any footage they managed to capture of its gentle, gigantic weight in the frozen dark, particularly how it mated or ate, would send scientists into a minor frenzy.

She would be diving with him. This was a new model of submersible with internal heating for the frigid temperatures, and one did not, in any circumstance, dive alone. Which was why one only dived with people one liked and trusted; she had once broken up a fist-fight inside a submersible, thanks to an accusation of theft about some eel data, and was intent on not doing that again.

Rose’s own research was largely tropical and based on stingrays, but she knew what she was doing; of the two of them she had the far more practical resumé, and could anchor Finn’s beautiful models and theorems in reality. Together they’d submitted this combined application in a horrible rush. Finn had originally proposed it to the Dauphin with Martin, but with Martin now dealing (Rose highly suspected) with a flood of spam calls and compromised identity claims after his various ID numbers and security details were carefully disseminated on the Dark Web, she was more than capable of filling in.

They talked over one another as they mounted the stairs. Their voices were different in timbre, but carried the same patterns, the same tricks of emphasis; a person trying to deal with the Blanchards speaking excitedly at the same time often had the sensation of getting an entire performance in stereo.

‘I hope it will be what we wanted. I know they sent us the schematics, but—’

‘It’ll be fine, Finn; we’ll do all the standard checks for camera placement, and I’m sure—’

The open decks of the Dauphin were, of course, wide and gorgeously polished. She and Finn passed the remains of the elaborate passenger breakfast buffet – açai bowls, burritos, sanctimonious granola, a pineapple carved somewhat confusingly into the shape of a dolphin. Everything was crowded; passengers and scientists, grouped together in the wind. There were so many new sheens and textures that Rose momentarily couldn’t focus. It was like being plunged into a reef for the first time; your senses required recalibration, a new adaptation to the flickering layers of light and the roaring in your ears. She had ascended into a new world, and all she could do was gaze a little helplessly, half-expecting a seahorse to drift out from behind somebody’s head.

‘Snacks!’ said Finn delightedly, and wandered over to the buffet. A crew member with the name tag OTSO – there were many of them present, she now realised, all starched to the point of acute angles, and with uniformly hard-parted hair – made a movement as if to dissuade him, but then, perhaps feeling Finn’s palpable aura of geniality and innocence, let his hands fall back to his sides. (This was a common occurrence with Finn, who had once been allowed to look at a rare specimen of baleen jewellery in Christie’s by a normally immovable Head of Sales who couldn’t quite explain herself afterwards.)

Without Finn to occupy her, Rose took a second to steady herself. If she was going to survive on this reef, or at least not make horrible faux pas, she thought, she wanted data. Data was stable. It allowed for courses of action.

So. The person with the most bars on his jacket was, she supposed, the Captain, a bewilderingly pale man whose long face, watching the proceedings on deck under an extended forehead, looked almost blank. No: his face turned to listen to somebody talking to him, and it transformed; his attention was wholly focussed, like a series of beams had suddenly formed out of a prism onto this one point.

The person who was talking to the Captain moved slightly more into the light. Rose, observing, thought at first that this was a person with the flattest face she’d ever seen, an oval almost featureless – but then the figure angled their head slightly and the shadow of a reflected light caught it, and Rose saw with a kind of astonishment that she was wrong. The face only appeared to be flat; in fact it had deeply carved cheekbones starting very high, eyes set right back into the skull, and a line of delicate bone above the brow. The shape of the mouth was intense and precise, thin lines worked down around the nose. What a thing to have a skull like that, Rose thought. It was beautiful, certainly, but in the sort of way that a Madonna is beautiful: you’d want to sit and revere it and anything it said might terrify you.

Her first instinct, as with all extraordinary things, was to want to study it – but there was something in the face that made the idea of measuring its aspects, of laying hands on it and extracting data, an unreal prospect, almost uncomfortable. Rose realised she was shivering slightly. It was a cold day, and they were heading north rapidly.

The person attached to the face was wearing chef’s whites, she saw. Whatever they were saying to the Captain was being said very fast. His face bore no reaction aside from rapt attention, but then, Rose thought, it likely rarely did.

The Captain made a kind of final gesture to this person, and then turned to the remainder of the deck’s occupants and spoke. He had, Rose noted, a well-modulated voice, not loud but with the clarity of somebody used to holding complete attention without effort, and the collection of people quieted.

‘Welcome to the Dauphin. We are honoured to welcome you on board one of the only vessels of its kind, one that will, as we traverse the Arctic Circle, be performing groundbreaking scientific research in various areas of marine biology.’ He paused for what was, perhaps, a less than inspired amount of appreciative noises.

He mentioned with grace the scientific efforts they would be undertaking on the voyage, pointed out several stops for sightseeing and the expected journey times between them, and added that the scientists would be given the opportunity to lecture on their particular area of interest. ‘We are also, on this journey, gifted with the presence of Elisabeth Lindgren, who will be in charge of the menu and whose reputation has doubtless preceded her.’ This, then, was the chef with the extraordinary face. Rose hadn’t heard of her, but clearly other people had; the appreciative noises this...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.12.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• ISBN-10: 0-571-38659-8 / 0571386598
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-38659-8 / 9780571386598