The Devil and the Dark Water

The Devil and the Dark Water Review

Stuart Turton’s follow-up to The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle asks: what happens when you take the locked-room mystery and make the room a ship at sea? The answer is The Devil and the Dark Water, a novel set aboard a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant vessel during the months-long voyage from Batavia to Amsterdam — a container so perfectly suited to the genre’s requirements that it seems surprising no one thought of it first.

The partnership at the centre of the novel — brilliant, imprisoned detective Samuel Pipps and his bodyguard Arent Hayes — inverts the expected dynamic of the genre. Pipps, the mind, is confined to the hold for the novel’s entirety. Hayes, the physical one, conducts the investigation on deck and reports back. The result is a mystery in which the detective must reconstruct events entirely from testimony and evidence brought to him, which gives the investigation an unusual texture: we are always at one remove from the events, filtered through Hayes’s observation and Pipps’s interpretation.

The historical setting is more than atmosphere. Turton has done enough research to give the Dutch Golden Age merchant world a convincing texture — the Company politics, the class hierarchies aboard ship, the particular brutalities of the spice trade — without letting the research slow the plot. The confined world of the Saardam feels lived-in rather than costumed.

The supernatural question is the book’s shrewdest structural choice. A figure calling itself Old Tom is claiming to be a demon, and people are dying in ways that look like demon work. Turton holds the question of whether something genuinely supernatural is occurring with impressive discipline, neither committing to the supernatural nor dismissing it, until the solution is revealed.

The solution is vintage Turton: everything reframes, nothing was wasted.

The Bodyguard Becomes the Detective

With Samuel Pipps — the celebrated “world’s greatest detective” — locked in a cramped cell below decks for almost the entire voyage, the real protagonist becomes his hulking, scarred bodyguard, Arent Hayes. The pleasure of this inversion is watching the muscle slowly grow into the mind: Hayes, who has spent years simply carrying out Pipps’s instructions, must now learn to observe, deduce, and reason for himself, ferrying evidence and theories back to his imprisoned friend. He is aided by Sara Wessel, a fiercely intelligent noblewoman trapped in a brutal marriage to the ship’s most powerful passenger, whose alliance with Hayes gives the book its emotional warmth and its sharpest social commentary. Together they form an investigative duo far more interesting than the celebrity detective the genre primed us to expect — and Turton uses the inversion to ask who really does the work behind a famous name.

Old Tom and the Discipline of Doubt

The novel’s shrewdest move is its handling of the supernatural. A malevolent presence calling itself Old Tom announces its arrival with a devil’s mark burned into the mainsail, the impossible reappearance of a dead leper, and a string of deaths that look like the work of something genuinely demonic. For most of the book, Turton refuses to tip his hand: he supplies just enough that a rational reader can suspect human contrivance, and just enough that a fearful one can believe in the devil. Sustaining that ambiguity across 450 pages of a closed shipboard world is a real feat of nerve, and it generates a gothic dread that his debut, for all its cleverness, never quite reached. The question of whether evil here is supernatural or entirely, depressingly human is the engine that drives every page.

The Dutch Golden Age, Fully Rigged

Turton’s research is one of the book’s quiet strengths. The seventeenth-century world of the United East India Company — its merciless commercial logic, its rigid shipboard hierarchies, its casual cruelties of class and empire, the superstition and religious terror of the age — is rendered with enough specificity to feel inhabited rather than draped over the plot like a costume. The Saardam itself becomes a character: a creaking, overcrowded, plague-anxious wooden world from which there is no escape for months. Crucially, the historical detail does narrative work, shaping motive and constraining action, so that the setting is not mere atmosphere but the very mechanism that makes the locked-room puzzle possible.

Turton’s Evolving Game

Coming after the dazzling time-loop gimmickry of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, The Devil and the Dark Water shows Turton consolidating his identity as the most inventive structural mystery writer of his generation. Where the debut won acclaim — and a Costa First Novel Award — chiefly for its high-concept machinery, this second book marries that ingenuity to richer atmosphere, deeper characters, and a sustained mood of dread that the cleverness of the first sometimes crowded out. It confirms the Turton formula: take a classic closed-circle setup in the Agatha Christie tradition, push it to an audacious extreme, withhold the full design until the final pages, and then reframe everything. Readers who love that game — the sense of an author playing fair while hiding the whole picture in plain sight — will find this among his most satisfying constructions.

The Reframe and Its Costs

True to form, Turton’s solution turns the whole book over, recasting earlier scenes and rewarding the attentive reader with the satisfying click of a design snapping into place. It is genuinely ingenious. It is also, by common consensus, imperfect: the mechanics of the conspiracy are so intricate that they require the culprits to explain themselves in long, expository monologues, and a few characters make late choices that sit awkwardly against how they were established. The large cast can be hard to track across the voyage, and the mid-section sags before the picture sharpens. These are real flaws — but they are the flaws of overabundant ingenuity rather than laziness, and most readers will forgive them for the pleasure of the puzzle.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A locked-room mystery at sea with a genuine historical atmosphere, an inventive detective partnership, and Turton’s trademark reframing finale.

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