The Devil and the Dark Water

“So this is how men go to the devil. Cap in hand and short of hope, all their prayers gone unanswered.”

A literal ship-in-a-bottle murder mystery, set in the 1600s, with supernatural elements. Not something I knew I needed or wanted until now, yet here we are. I will be upfront at the beginning here – there are some problematic elements to this that made it hard for me to rate this book. I'm fully honest here that I probably was generous with the rating because I enjoyed the ride so much.

The Saardam, bound to Amsterdam from Batavia, is taking on passengers. A detective, Samuel Pipps, and his friend/bodyguard Arent Hayes are aboard, the former as a prisoner being transported and the latter as his escort and support on the way to trial. Also aboard is the Governor General, Jan Haan, his wife, his daughter, and his consort, as well as a small handful of other characters notable for their role in the events to come. Immediately before the ship gets underway, a mysterious leper calls out a curse on the ship and all aboard and immediately bursts into flames. Under this inauspicious event a great deal of superstition is fostered amongst the passengers and crew, superstition that is fanned even more after whispers are heard at night, a mysterious lantern is seen following them at night, animals are mysteriously slaughtered, and a great deal other supernatural events. Arent and Haan's wife Sara become neck deep in trying to solve the mystery, but with a deadline imposed on them all by Old Tom and things becoming more mysterious and not less, they aren't sure if they can in time.

I really enjoyed the setup and the mystery, just the right amounts of downtime spent trying to uncover clues and actual action and events that add layers to the whole thing. This was my first book by Stuart Turton, and I especially loved his writing style here. The actual mystery is a real head-scratcher, and I found myself making wrong guess after wrong guess at what was actually going on. I won't say much about the actual conclusion though, just that it wasn't what I was expecting. I actually felt a little let down at the big reveal at the end, but not enough to regret reading the book. Suffice it to say that there's a great deal of twists near the end, like any good mystery novel.

The elephant in the room here, and the reason for the 4 stars and not 5, is the author's handling of Sara's situation, and the situation of the female passengers near the end more generally. While, yes, it is the 1600s, and there's a certain amount of cultural baggage that comes with the era, I could have done without the on-page occurrences of spousal abuse. Additionally, (and, spoilers here for the end of the book events, but not the mystery as a whole), during the shipwreck period, why do we leap immediately to "well, we're low on food, I guess we should create a harem with the unmarried female passengers to keep crew morale up"? It felt tonally off, considering the rest of the book. Yes, mutiny, scum of the sea, thieves and villains all, I get it, but there's other ways to convey that than island sex slavery. .

All that said, I still really enjoyed the high seas murder mystery feel, and thus the 4 stars. I understand some of it may be hard to overlook though, and can understand the varying experiences listed here. I also listened to the audiobook, and thought the narrator did an excellent job at narrating this book and keeping my interest.

3.5/5. Having read Turton's “Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”, I had an idea of what to expect going into this one. Turton excels in mystery and atmosphere, but falls a little short in characters and writing style. This one was essentially that, except that, while the mystery was serviceable and definitely more interesting than your average run-of-the-mill contemporary mysteries, it still didn't match up to the confounding brilliance of Evelyn Hardcastle. While I read Evelyn Hardcastle almost entirely in one sitting because it was such a page-turner, I took almost a whole 2 weeks to finish this one, and never felt quite as much compelled to continue except when I just wanted to get this over and done with.

Honestly, it could also just be the subject matter for me. I don't think I particularly enjoy books that are excessively to do with ships and sailors and the like. If it's a mystery on a ship, and using the ship simply as a setting to have these people isolated at sea together, that's totally fine. But in this book, the layout of the ship, its crew, its fleet and all of those technical naval terms played a somewhat larger role than I would otherwise have liked. That could have contributed to my finding it more difficult to engage with the mystery than Evelyn Hardcastle.

The characters in this one were also hard to root for. I didn't feel particularly sympathetic towards anyone in this book, and a lot of times I found characters' personalities and decisions to be unrealistic and bewildering, and their dialogue sometimes stilted and unnatural. I found that sometimes things happened almost too conveniently too. A lot of the things that happened, both in the backstories of the characters as well as within the events of the book, just felt exaggerated and contrived for the purpose of creating a colourful mystery. I found this also to be the case in Evelyn Hardcastle (I barely remember any of the characters in there now), so there's no surprise here for me.

I felt like the book could also be shorter too. Despite all the action, I felt like some parts of the book really dragged for me. Plus, I felt like the major events of the book could have been more squeezed together to create more bated-breath tension, but the lulls in between each major event felt a little too long. There were a lot of details that I also kinda missed in the book because there're so many details, and I often found myself wondering, “Wait, how did we get here?” from one chapter to the next.

The resolution of the mystery also somewhat felt a little contrived but I was satisfied with the solution of the mystery. Some parts of it I had guessed or wasn't surprised at, others were a little more interesting and unexpected. Overall it wasn't incredibly mind-blowing plot twists, but it was definitely still satisfying.

I still gave this a 3.5 though because Turton really does a sinister atmosphere really well. One could almost feel the filth and the squalor that the crew of the Sardaam were living in. Despite my complaints about the mystery, there was still enough substance to it to make me at least want to finish the book, instead of being completely apathetic as to the solution, so that's at least a bit of a win.