Dead in the Water

London, summer 1942. With American forces now arriving in Britain, DCI Frank Merlin investigates a sequence of deaths involving intelligence officers, a body recovered from the Thames and a clandestine art transaction. The trail crosses espionage, gangland and the wartime art market, where works taken from Jewish owners in occupied Europe can be hidden behind layers of dealers, intermediaries and competing claims.

The fifth Merlin novel combines a fictional murder conspiracy with the documented wartime problems of Nazi art theft and intelligence activity in London. Armenian oil financier and collector Calouste Gulbenkian appears under his own historical identity in connection with the art plot; the particular transaction and crimes are fictional. The novel’s wider setting reflects Britain after the United States entered the war but before the Allied turn to continental invasion.