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THE DEVIL AND THE DARK WATER
by Stuart Turton (Raven £8.99, 574pp)
Stuart Turton won a Costa First Novel award for his genre-busting debut, The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle.
His second novel is an equally vibrant mix of history, fantasy and detective fiction, set in 1634 aboard the Saardam, a ship transporting a colonial governor of the Dutch East India company to Amsterdam.
Also aboard the ship is Samuel Pipps, a famous detective who helped the governor recover a mysterious scientific object but is now chained in a tiny cell, and Pipps’s bodyguard, Arent Hayes, as huge and ugly as Pipps is small and handsome.
Published December 22, 2020, 10:44 AM
Adventures with a capital A, and fantasies with a capital F
If you’re looking for reading material come Christmas holidays and are in the mood for riveting literary fiction, here are four weighty recommendations. From adventure on the high seas, to a zany comic-book world, to a current Drama/Mystery bestseller and the latest from
Susanna Clarke after 16 years of silence something for everyone with a yen for quality fiction.
The Devil & the Dark Water by Stuart Turton
After the success of his first novel,
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which was a Costa Best First Novel award winning, genre-bending modern-day murder mystery, you have to doff your hat to Turton for gifting us with the unexpected for his second novel. It may be a mystery once again but, this time, it’s coupled with adventure on the high seas and is set aboard a merchant vessel sailing from Batavia to Amsterdam in 1634. It’s historical fiction, with an extreme
The Devil and the Dark Water: The ship’s cargo is murder and greed
The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, was one of my favorite reads of 2018, a compulsively readable and wildly original murder mystery, an homage to Agatha Christie, with a science fictional wrapper. Turton’s second novel,
The Devil and the Dark Water (2020), is a highly twisty and eerie Sherlockian mystery, set in the seventeenth century on a large ship traveling from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) to Amsterdam. At first glance it’s not much at all like
7½ Deaths, except in the intricacy of the plot … and the way it mixes together different genres, and the vivid and complex characters who are far more than they first appear, and the insightful and subtle writing … well, perhaps his two books have more in common than I first thought.