Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry

"I’m not really supposed to pick favorites but as I don’t have any say in the shortlist choice or the winner, I can say that this book is one of my favorites. It’s a thriller, starting from what sounds like an unpromising premise, of an oil tanker hijacked off the coast of Yemen. David Mockett is a marine surveyor who is called in when the boat is set on fire and the crew escape. He is called in on behalf of insurers to find out what’s gone on. I won’t give away the plot, but it’s a murky tale which ultimately turns out to be fraud. The second half of the book weaves in the white-collar elements: Lloyd’s of London, insurance, lawyers fighting with the ship owners and others with an interest in the case, to prove what’s gone on. It’s very nicely done. For me, it opened the door onto a whole clubby world of insurance—which I have written about a bit—and also the much more rogue and wilder world of shipping and ship owning and everything attached to it. Then there’s the additional element of Yemeni state conflict going on. The book explains it very well and it’s worth reading for that alone, really. It’s certainly a book I might go back to, if I was writing on this topic, the whole area of flags of convenience, how Greek ship owners came to dominance (the ship is ultimately owned by a Greek tycoon), what happens in the world’s shipping lanes. There’s a lovely potted history of scuttling and why people would scuttle ships for good reasons and bad. It’s just a fascinating perspective on an area that I certainly didn’t know much about."