The book begins with a terrific passage:

“The child looked like a porcelain doll. Dark eyelashes resting on pale cheeks, softly pouting lips, sandy hair swept neatly under a flat brown cap. Delicate hands folded across a miniature cotton shirt and waistcoat. A figure of peace, placed in repose on the bracken as if simply lying down to rest next to a pyramid of rocks. Even the bluish tinge to the skin could have explained away by the moonlight.“

Sarah Sultoon is not the first writer to exploit the dank mysteries of the Essex marshes. In Bleak House, Dickens used the perennial swirling mist and sense of despair as a metaphor for the obfuscations and terminal lack of transparency which enmesh Jarndyce v Jarndyce. The River Blackwater exists. It rises in rural Essex and expands into a considerable estuary, but the island in this novel is pure fiction.

On starting the novel I wondered how someone could sustain a thriller billed to be about the fabled Millennium Bug – something that never actually happened. I should have had more faith. The discovery of a dead child on Blackwater Island is only briefly mentioned on the news as the world waits for computer systems to shut down, and passenger jets to tumble from the sky, but journalist Jonny Murphy is sent down to Essex to investigate. What he finds is truly astonishing.

Deeply embedded in the mystery is Murphy, aided and abetted by his American ‘not quite’ girlfriend Paloma. He is certainly fearless, but I was reminded of those female characters in Hammer horror films, who decide to go and investigate the ruined church at midnight, dressed in a negligee, and armed only with a flickering candle. Despite our cries of ‘Don’t go there!’ she does, as does Johnny.

This is indeed a weird and wonderful fantasy. The closest comparison I can come up with may only chime with readers who share my my advanced years, but Blackwater is rather reminiscent of the African tales of H Rider Haggard. I suspect no-one reads him these days, but back in the day his fantastical tales of adventure were very popular. Essex is a long way from darkest Africa, but Sarah Sultoon emulates Haggard by creating a cast of intriguingly odd characters. Instead of Gagool, the malevolent witch in King Solomon’s Mines, we have Judith, the strange landlady of The Saxon: Haggard gave us the imposing Ayesha in She, (as in She Who Must Be Obeyed) but here we have ‘Jane’, the Amazonian former special forces trooper who lurks on the island. Sultoon then decides to go for broke and throw into the mix triplets, a grief-stricken recluse and an emaciated druid.

Aside from the goings-on in the riverside hamlet of Eastwood, where Judith’s pub serves only plates of local oysters and glasses of a locally concocted spirit consisting mainly of ethanol, there is a serious background which revolves round biological warfare and the way governments across the world will lie to the people who elected it, all in the name of ‘national interest’. Despite the improbable storyline, Blackwater is immensely entertaining, and I read it over a couple of enjoyable evenings. It is published by Orenda Books and is available now.