Blue Water: the Instant Times Bestseller (Laurence Jago)

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War Office official Mr Jenkinson, also on board the Tankerville, has offered to hide the Treaty in a safe place, but when he is found dead and the papers disappear Jago realises it’s up to him to find them and prevent them from falling into French hands. Leonora Nattrass lectured on the literature and politics of the 18th century for almost ten years before running away to Cornwall, where she now lives in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts and knits the wool of her small flock of Ryeland sheep into elaborate jumpers. The reader is right there, on board the transatlantic mail ship, the Tankerville, tasting the salty air, feeling the heat and humidity of the Caribbean with every creak and groan of the ship. But the characters were flat or confusing, everyone just wandered around the ship mumbling and there was really no intrigue or story at all. The narrator doesn't help - a voice less suitable is hard to imagine and he barely attempts to convince you he is a seafarer/aristocrat/civil war era civil servant.

Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). The prose was in keeping with the style I would expect for the time, but this made it quite wordy and dull, although the variety of diary entries, letters and the Captain’s log did help to break it up. The plot suffers from a lack of breadth as do almost all books set in so limited a scene as a ship at sea, but Natrass did her best with it and the book was engaging enough, despite the abject failure of the attempt at plot-twist introduction.Wallis, who is miserable, paranoid and desperate for the liberty that only America can provide, claims to have a secret document which will bring down the Protectorate, and asks Rose to recover it from its hiding place … Brilliantly imagined and thoroughly chilling, this is a counterfactual tour de force. Philpot remains the best character and I delight in the colours his face turns and I do still quite like Jago even though his taste in women is appalling. To all intents and purposes travelling as assistant to the exuberant journalist William Philpott, Jago's real mission is to aid the civil servant carrying a vital treaty – one that will prevent the Americans from joining with the French in the war against Britain – to Congress.

She lives in Cornwall, in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts, and spins the fleeces of her Ryeland sheep into yarn. Disgraced civil servant Laurence Jago is now travelling across the Atlantic with a hidden mission, to protect the important Treaty being carried to the Americas.I was impressed throughout with the author’s skills in recreating the period setting, including the formality of language and etiquette. When the civil servant meets an unfortunate ‘accidental’ end, Laurence becomes the one person standing between Britain and disaster.

I hadn’t read Black Drop, the book introducing Laurence Jago, but I didn’t feel I had missed out on any back story.This is my first Leonora Nattrass book, but I do have Black Drop on my shelf which I will definitely be picking up soon, given how much I enjoyed Blue Water.

Almost like a locked room mystery, the fact this the setting was primarily on board the Tankerville meant that as the reader you can only assume you know what is happening, but as the way with many well written mysteries, the twists keep coming to ensure nothing is as you think. A delightful and immersive read which follows neatly on from Black Drop which I read last year (but can be read as a stand-alone). Ostensibly travelling as assistant to the irrepressible journalist William Philpott, Laurence's real mission is to aid the civil servant carrying a vital treaty to Congress. It’s an enjoyable historical account and good reading material while I was travelling on the US east coast, learning about the young republic and its founding fathers. The chapters of Jago’s report are interspersed with snippets from the Captain’s log and newspaper articles from Philpott, the journalist who Jago is assisting.Fashionable west London is the setting for Griffiths’s third novel to feature DI Harbinder Kaur, now relocated from Sussex.