Author: ramblingmads

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?

And what if Y2K wasn’t a hoax, but a warning…?

Sarah Sultoon is an award-winning journalist and writer, whose work as an international news executive with CNN and for Channel 4 News has taken her all over the world, from the seats of power in both Westminster and Washington to the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her debut thriller, The Source, was a Capital Crime Book Club pick, won the Crime Fiction Lover Best Debut Award, was nominated for the CWA’s New Blood Dagger, was a number one bestseller on Kindle and is currently in production with Lime Pictures. It was followed by the critically acclaimed The Shot, Dirt and Death Flight.

My thoughts: a new book by Sarah Sultoon is pretty much a guaranteed stay-up-all-night-totally-gripped read. And so this one is.

Set in 1999, when I was 13, the eve of the Millennium, when Y2K was a paranoid fear, when computers weren’t as prevalent as they are today but still heavily relied on, people genuinely thought aeroplanes might fall out of the sky. But everyone was also geared up for a massive party with fireworks and the Millennium Dome (now the O2 Arena) was a huge tourist draw.

However, in a quiet Essex backwater, on an island designated a Special Scientific area of Study and therefore off limits, things are happening of a different nature. A young boy’s body is found on the island, he’s dressed in strange clothes and seems to have come from nowhere. No one is that bothered, and the only police officer in the area can’t do much.

Reporter Johnny has been sent to find out more, his editor desperate for something other than the Millennium to fill the pages of the newspaper. Finding the tiny village with its pub and not much else is one thing, getting anyone to talk about the island is another.

But out there in the marshes is a story bigger than anything Johnny has covered before, if he survives long enough to file it. 

Intelligent, engaging and utterly brilliant, this is a book that will not only keep you up all night but leave you gasping and utterly hooked. Clear your calendar. 

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own