A few years ago, I very much enjoyed Dirt by Sarah Sultoon, which was set in an Israeli kibbutz near the Lebanese border, a multi-stranded thriller that was full of tension. Sultoon is an award-winning journalist who worked for CNN and Channel 4, and has extensive knowledge of world situations. Interestingly, she set that novel in the mid-1990s, before smart-phones and the internet for all. This is also the case for her latest novel, Blackwater, which is set on the run-up to the Millennium Eve on December 31st, 1999. This time, the enemy is ostensibly technology!
In 1999, I worked for a giant multi-national chemical company. They were absolutely paranoid during that period. Why? Because of Y2K! The threat that all computers all around the world would crash as systems often only used the last two digits of the year which made 00 ambiguous, and cause a potential reset to a previous century. I was put into a team to look at how it might affect us in the UK, meanwhile the stuff coming out of the parent company in the US on this seemed like gobbledygook to me. As you may recall, the clocks ticked over and nothing major happened, but companies had poured millions into checking and upgrading IT systems to negate anything happening which they probably needn’t have.
Sultoon has taken this panic and built a thriller around it that was not at all what I expected. In the short prologue, we begin with a body – don’t we always? But it’s Christmas Day 1999 and an anonymous caller has alerted the police in Maldon, Essex, that there is a child’s body on Blackwater Island, a protected nature reserve. No-one is allowed there.
Meanwhile, Jonny Murphy is a journalist on the International Tribune, and back at their London offices is still smarting from having failed the final exercise in a escape from tricky situations course. He was desperate to be sent back out to a war zone to report, but for now he’s stuck reporting on Y2K and his colleague Paloma isn’t helping. Instead, his editor Lukas sends him out to Blackwater to tease out some information on the child’s body – no-one has come forward to claim him yet. Jonny finds the hamlet in the wilds of the Essex wetlands a lonely place, the landlady of the pub cagey, and later in Maldon, a Detective Inspector forced to work on her own covering the whole area. Gill Peters is tearing her hair out – she can’t get support to leverage the case, but with Jonny’s unofficial help with some media coverage, they might be able to do something that will make the police hierarchy respond. The island has supposed protected status, and she shouldn’t set foot on it. This is how Jonny and Paloma, who turns up to see how he is, do some more digging on the last day before the millennium turns, end up trespassing on the island and making a major shocking discovery, or two, or three.
I must stop there, no spoilers. But how Sultoon links the goings on in Essex to Y2K and the celebrations is masterful. When you think it’s solved, it isn’t. This where, although he failed the course, Jonny’s kidnap and escape training comes in useful.
There’s a will-they-won’t-they? kick to Jonny and Paloma’s relationship with gives a little bit of spikiness here and there to keep it interesting. I must admit I really warmed to DI Gill Peters, who is struggling in the Blackwater backwater, and seizes the opportunity to prove her worth to her male colleagues; and she has hidden depths and secrets too, which I’d never have guessed until they surface.
I enjoyed this even more than Dirt, racing through the pages, remembering the spectacular fireworks in London and hoping that Sarah Sultoon wouldn’t detour into the realms of fantasy and make Y2K actually happen. From the sleepy village beginning to the high octane finish, this thriller was brillant, page-turning fun.
Source: Review copy – thank you. Orenda paperback original. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK+ P&P)
