The Surf House

Plot contrivances and purple prose mar Clarke’s latest standalone (after The Hike). While on a photo shoot in Marrakesh, frustrated fashion model Bea quits her job and rushes out of her hotel. She soon gets lost in Marrakesh’s mazelike alleyways, where two men rob and prepare to sexually assault her. At the last minute, she’s saved by a knife-wielding woman named Marnie, who helps Bea kill her attacker. The women flee the scene, and Bea accepts Marnie’s offer of refuge at her guesthouse on the Moroccan coast. Their respite is soon threatened by a blackmailer, who claims to have recovered the bloody knife from the murder scene and demands thousands of dollars the women don’t have to keep the weapon out of the hands of the police. Then a man named Seth Hart arrives at Marnie’s guesthouse, offering a reward for information about his sister, Savannah, who vanished from the area a year earlier. As Bea digs further into Savannah’s disappearance, Clarke reveals a flurry of secrets each character is hiding, which exhaust more often than they shock. Overwrought language (“they lose themselves in each other, while the stars spin above”) doesn’t help. This misses the mark. Agent: Grainne Fox, UTA. (May)