Woodman, Richard (1944- ). Dead Man Talking.

Woodman's imaginative take on the infamous (and ill-fated) World War 2 Murmansk Run merchant ship convoy PQ-17 makes for a novel that's hard to put down once you start reading it. His conceit is to provide the "real" reason why Royal Navy escorts abandoned the convoy to German U-boats and Luftwaffe bombers high in the Arctic en route to Russia (25 out of 36 merchant ships in the convoy were lost to enemy action because of this abandonment, the heaviest losses ever incurred on the Murmansk Run). In his novel, Woodman focuses on a merchant officer-turned-Royal Navy officer (Lieutenant Commander John Clark) who's sent out by the British Admiralty on a secret mission in late Spring / Summer 1942 to track down and sink a giant prototype cruiser U-boat (code named "Orca") about to set up base along the route of the Allies' convoy route north of Norway. Clark's own command is a whaler which has been heavily armed with both deck-mounted artillery and also hidden torpedo tubes. In this neat piece of fiction, PQ-17 stumbles into Clark's stalking of the U-boat - and with disastrous results. Woodman's Arctic descriptions are particularly well done and these, along with a talent for delineating major characters, make up for the author's over-reliance on coincidence in his narrative.