Blackwater by Sarah Sultoon 

As the clock ticks towards the millennium – and the threat of a potentially new apocalyptic reality – Jonny Murphy is sent to investigate the discovery of a child’s body on a deserted swamp island, fifty miles from London. What he finds is more than just a tragedy, it’s a warning. Something big is coming … Can Jonny stop it? Should he?

London, Christmas 1999. The world is on edge. With the new millennium just days away, fears of the Millennium Bug are spiralling – warnings of computer failures, market crashes, even global catastrophe. But fifty miles east, on the frozen Blackwater Island, a different kind of mystery unfolds. A child’s body is discovered on the bracken, untouched by footprints, with no sign of how he died. And no one has come forward to claim him.

At the International Tribune, reporter Jonny Murphy senses something is off. Police are appealing for relatives, not suspects. An anonymous call led officers to the scene, but no one knows who made it. While the world fixates on a digital apocalypse, Jonny sees the real disaster unfolding closer to home. With just twenty-hour hours before the century turns, he heads to Blackwater – driven by curiosity, desperation, and the sting of rejection from his colleague Paloma.

But Blackwater has secrets buried deep in the frozen ground. More victims – some dead, others still paying for past sins. And when Paloma catches up to him, they stumble onto something far bigger than either of them imagined. Something that could change everything. The millennium is coming. The clock is ticking. Can Jonny stop it? Should he?

I went into this novel quite late, so I was incredibly pleased to find that this is definitely a gripping, read in one sitting type of thriller. This is Sarah Sultoon’s third novel featuring investigative journalist Jonny Murphy, but could very easily be read as a standalone. For people like me, old enough to be an adult at the time of the possible ‘millennium bug’, I remember the panic and the predictions that planes would fall out of the sky, banking systems would collapse and the apocalypse would begin. I remember the money spent trying to mitigate its potential effects but like the British seem to do, we gathered with friends and family anyway and set off fireworks in the freezing cold and precisely nothing happened. It feels like an innocent time now, when we think that 9/11 came only 18 months later, followed by going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and then years of austerity followed by a pandemic. It’s certainly been turbulent ever since. My dad was convinced that the bug was a made up bogeyman, allowing technology companies and their shareholders to clean up by proposing to ‘fix’ something that didn’t exist. Maybe he was right. We don’t call him Fox Mulder for nothing.

Here Sarah Sultoon has created a fast paced thriller that plays out in the days before Millennium Eve. The timing gives us a countdown, but believe me this story creates its own tension. The setting of Blackwater Island is familiar but alien at the same time. Situated in an inlet only 50 miles from London and with a direct route by boat into the Channel and the Thames this place is hiding in plain site. Beyond the last village, the terrain feels like the eerie marshlands at the beginning of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. The mist is so thick someone could be standing next to you and the black, viscous mud has the feel of quicksand. It sucks all explorers into its depths and is enough to put anyone off reaching the island itself. As if that wasn’t enough, the author brings elements of folk horror to the narrative as Jonny is warned off by very unfriendly and odd locals. The only place to stay is an old inn in the village, but the landlady isn’t very welcoming. She warns him that the only resident of Blackwater is Inka who is depicted in a framed picture behind the bar and on graffiti near the island:  

“it’s apparently a picture of a ghost that’s been haunting Blackwater since the Dark Ages. Our landlady told me some mad story about a mythical Icelandic warrior named Inka with a diamond-tipped spear and a mermaid’s tail.” 

Jonny is canny enough to know when he’s being warned away from something and it only sets his investigative skills tingling. On the other hand, actual protection for the crime scene is very thin on the ground. He meets the only police officer in the area and she feels like she’s been dumped in the backwaters of Essex with no support or back up. The facts are that the body of a boy was found on the island with no visible cause of death, but the weirdest part is that he was dressed like an extra from Oliver! His Victorian urchin clothing is so incongruous, but could mean anything from local amateur dramatics to time travel. It’s once Jonny manages to get on the island that answers start to come and it was nothing I’d considered. 

Jonny is a rather fascinating character. He’s absolutely determined to track down his story and has defensive walls a mile high where friendship and romance are concerned. Yet he does have empathy and tries to take the honourable route where possible. He clearly has feelings for photographer Paloma, but has been determined not to pursue them, not wanting to inflict himself on someone else. What does he know about himself that makes him hesitate? Will the story always come first? The scariest part of the whole story is that it’s believable and the afterword really does show that sometimes, what feels far fetched, is only the beginning. Taking in biological experimentation and weaponry, black ops, government conspiracies and the price paid by the locals caught up in it, it’s the writing and the very real atmosphere at the time that makes this a believable story. Jonny’s mission becomes unbearably tense as he has to make it to the centre of London with the city’s ’River of Fire’ fireworks display under threat. Thousands are gathered to hear Big Ben strike midnight and the start of a new century. Jonny fears they may be the target, but there’s also the press area where Paloma is hoping to catch the display on camera, no matter his reservations he’s determined to save her. Events and emotions build and I was half expecting a huge explosion, but Sarah Sultoon is more subtle than that and the fear here is insidious. It warns us not to trust those in authority, to question and investigate everything – an instinct that in real life seems to have been lost since the pandemic. Jonny is a brilliant hero because he has that instinct still and a moral compass that guides his work, something that’s a rare combination. This is incredibly tense, gripping and packed full of action with the added nostalgia of millennium memories. 

Out now from Orenda Books

Meet the Author

Sarah Sultoon is a novelist and journalist, whose prior work as an international news executive at CNN has taken her all over the world, from the seats of power in both Westminster and Washington to the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan. She has extensive experience in conflict zones, winning three Peabody awards for her work on the war in Syria, an Emmy for her contribution to the coverage of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, and a number of Royal Television Society gongs. As passionate about fiction as nonfiction, she recently completed a Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, adding to an undergraduate degree in languages, chosen mainly so she could spend time itinerantly travelling the world. She likes running, Indian food, cocktails, playing sport with her children and throwing a ball for her dog, order dependent on when the cocktails are consumed.