The Relief Boat – Paperback

The relief boat arrives at Skelder Alpha, ninety miles out in the North Sea, to swap the maintenance crew. Nobody meets it at the ladder.

The platform is running perfectly. The radio is playing in the galley. Four mugs of coffee stand on the side, still warm. The outgoing crew’s survival suits hang on their pegs and their boots stand on the rack. But the crew have vanished, and the last entry in the station log, pressed so hard the pen went through the paper, says only: DON’T LET THEM ABOARD.

Crew lead Nell Fairbrother has a choice. Get back on the boat before the storm closes in, or stay and find out what happened to Joe Merriman, the man who trained her. She stays. So does her crew: a cheerful young comms engineer, an ex-Army medic with a secret, a silent rope-access technician, and a “client rep” from head office who arrived on the manifest the night before and won’t say what is in his locked case.

Then the satellite link dies. A body turns up in the cable trench with bruises on its wrists. And a ship with its transponder switched off moves closer through the dark.

Somebody on Skelder Alpha is working for the people on that ship. Somebody let them aboard once already. And when the storm drops for a few hours, they will try again.

The Relief Boat is a claustrophobic, storm-lashed mystery about trust, loyalty and the infrastructure nobody watches, set on the cold steel edge of the North Sea.