Water of Death [Hardcover]

Paul Johnston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 2001

EDINBURGH 2025: Global warming has turned the summer into the Big Heat in Edinburgh, an independent, virtually crime-free oasis surrounded by anarchic city states and run by the Council of City Guardians.In a city where television, private cars and cigarettes are banned, and electricity, food and sex are rationed, citizens live for the weekly lottery drawing while serving tourists in their year-round festival. Their reverie is broken when a recent lottery winner goes missing, and subversive, blues-haunted private investigator Quintilian Dalrymple is called in to investigate the disappearance. Soon after, a body is discovered in the Water of Leith - a bottle of contraband whisky the only clue left behind.The Council, increasingly fearful of losing its grip on power, expects Quint to stop the tormentors dead in the water. But he is having serious difficulty distinguishing friend from foe during the Big Heat. Meanwhile the body count, like the temperature, keeps on rising...AUTHORBIO: Paul Johnston was born in Edinburgh in 1957. He now divides his time between a small Greek island and the United Kingdom. Water of Death features characters from both Body Politic, winner of the CWA John Creasey Award for best first crime novel, and The Bone Yard.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Things are not ducky in Edinburgh in 2025. Indeed, they've been far from ducky since the financial collapse of 2002, the crippling global warming, the UK's devolution into so many anarchic city-states, and Edinburgh's embrace of the Enlightenment (the ironic name of their dystopian state, controlled by the Council of City Guardians) and its de facto absence of individual liberty.

On the bright side, crime's down, tourism's up, and the Edlott lottery (a "citizen's" only shot at betterment) is doing land-office business. A pity, then, that recent winner Fordyce Kennedy's gone missing and Frankie Thomson, a demoted Auxiliary Guardsman, has turned up dead on the banks of the Water of Leith. Ironically, Frankie died of nicotine poisoning after sampling a contraband bottle of "Ultimate Usquebaugh." Usquebaugh is Gaelic for "the water of life," or whisky.

Enter Quintilian Dalrymple, Water of Death's noirish, blues-haunted hero, a freelance detective (himself a demotee from the powerful Auxiliary Guard thanks to exploits detailed in 1999's award-winning Body Politic and 2000's The Bone Yard) who's reluctantly tapped by the Guardians when things get deadly. With the help of his Guardsman sidekick, Davie, and the sufferance of a by-the-book superior, Quint is tasked with finding Fordyce, finding Frankie's murderer, and finally, finding Fordyce's murderer after he, too, succumbs to Ultimate Usquebaugh. In the meantime, Quint juggles the professional-intimate relationship he's having with the city's Senior Guardian, Sophia, the reemergence of his ex-lover, Katharine, and the fact that Katharine, Sophia, and countless others are possible committers of the mounting crimes.

Intelligent, breezy, and surely paced, Paul Johnston's wryly humorous mystery succeeds despite its basic whodunit plot. Clever dialogue and likeable (if not wholly fleshed) characters abound, and the near-future setting provides enough diversion and sociopolitical food-for-thought to nicely carry the day. -- Michael Hudson

From Publishers Weekly

A rogue crime fighter in a failed utopian Edinburgh in the year 2025 is such a strong concept that some of its original glow remains in this third entry in the series. But flaws that niggled in the first two books (Body Politic; The Bone Yard) painfully heavy-handed similes on virtually every page; a never-ending barrage of attitude between the hero and his supervisors have now become dangerous distractions. It takes more work than it should to follow Quint Dalrymple, as the former cop-turned-freelance chief investigator for the elite ruling Council tries to solve a series of murders during an extremely hot summer. Edinburgh's ordinary citizens, suffering through a severe water shortage while the city's reservoirs flow lavishly for the foreign tourists who support the local economy, are dying from poisoned whiskey. The first victim is the winner of a new lottery designed to take people's minds off how badly the independence movement called the Enlightenment formed after the drug wars and economic disasters of the years 2001 through 2004 has faltered. Quint's former lover is a prime suspect in the poisonings, so the anti-establishment investigator is even more conflicted than usual as he goes about his work. Despite the distractions, Dalrymple who loves blues music and 20th-century noir mysteries remains an arresting presence, and Johnston often uses his blighted futuristic landscape to great ironic advantage (a key scene takes place in what used to be Craiglockhart War Hospital, where WWI shellshock victims Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were treated). (Apr. 4) FYI: Ian Rankin raved about Body Politic and Johnston returns the favor here by having Dalrymple reading Rankin's Black and Blue, just removed from the proscribed list when "the Council lifted the ban on pre-Enlightenment Scottish crime fiction."
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (March 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312273118
• ISBN-13: 978-0312273118
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,941,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting sf mystery, February 15, 2001

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Water of Death (Hardcover)

In 2025, compared with the anarchy that surrounds it, Edinburgh remains a calm island of no crime. Though rationing is a way of life and entertainment only comes in the form of a festival for tourists, the clever City Council occupies the restless residents with a weekly lottery. How can individuals not play when a five-minute shower a day is a potential prize.

However, a missing person interrupts the lottery nirvana when Kennedy, a winner, simply vanishes. Rumors spread quickly, and the concerned Edinburgh leadership hires private investigator Quint Dalrymple to quickly learn the truth. Before he can solve that case, murdered bodies begin to appear in the Leith, leaving the City Council in a panic, a city in fear, and a pressured Quint trying to stop a body count from growing any further.

Award winning Paul Johnston's world is radically different from that of today. Global warming has reached extreme levels turning the climate into the Big Heat. Everything seems rationed and centrally controlled. Still Quint remains an interesting character with his obsession for the blues standing out in this drab world. Mr. Johnston brings in his full cast from the previous two books, but instead of the welcome return of old friends, this sends a clever story line spinning into chaos greater than his surrounding countryside. Doomsday fanatics will relish WATER OF DEATH and its predecessors for its descriptive look at an apparently dying society trying to survive. However, readers of other science fiction sub-genres will struggle with the plot's anarchy.

Harriet Klausner