Maelstrom

Once driven by an idealistic commitment to protect the environment, Fred Hope has left his swashbuckling days of cutting tuna nets and ramming whale boats behind. Today, he sits in Pulteney's Seaview Hotel tending to his business and to his quadriplegic wife. A daughter of the British aristocracy, she conceived and carried out a disastrous personal act of environmental terrorism - one that left her crippled for life. Although she has withdrawn from her husband and from the world, Fred has remained steadfast in his devotion to her demands and her desires. As owner of a recycling company, the brainchild of his beloved Uncle Ernie, Fred deals in scrap metal. But the deal is about to change ... and so is his life. Two events draw him back into action and back to the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. His partner - his wife's cherished stepbrother - announces that he has chartered their boat to a group of Norwegian whalers. And word has arrived from Ireland that seventy-eight-year-old Uncle Ernie, a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist accused of running arms to the IRA, is dead ... his shrewd-eyed, mischievous face, and unruly mop of white hair now but a haunting and bittersweet memory - one that refuses to rest in peace. A dedicated anti-fascist in his youth, Uncle Ernie made plenty of enemies in his life, and the mystery surrounding his death is only compounded when Fred discovers the identity of the Norwegian chartering his boat: Thor Landsman, an unrepentant Nazi and godson of Hermann Goering. Fred fears that Hope Recyclers could become a tool in the resurgence of a fifty-year-old evil - in an even more deadly form. Uncovering a connection between Landsman and the Irish Republican Army, Hope becomes convinced that Uncle Ernie knew too much about the operation ... and that he himself knows too little. From the streets of London, where he is viciously attacked by members of the Provisional IRA, to the coast of Norway, where he discovers a remote village terrorized by neo-