I so thoroughly enjoyed 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Stuart Turton’s latest novel, a mystery set aboard a 17th century East Indiaman trade ship sailing from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Amsterdam. Within pages of meeting Sammy Pipps, a detective or “thief-catcher” of Holmesian perception, and his bodyguard/Watson/Boswell Arent Hayes, I was hooked. That’s the difficulty of strong openings: The rest of the novel has to live up to them. Now I’m sadly in the position of […]
Don’t you hate when a book starts out strong only to disappoint you?
The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton