Drowned Lives by Stephen Booth, Book Review

Do you ever watch ‘Who do you think you are?’ Or have you ever wondered about your family history? Even if you have traced your line back as far as you can, turning up a few skeletons along the way, you probably didn’t consider genealogy a dangerous past-time. But then you haven’t read Stephen Booth’s Drowned Lives yet.

Take a loner who is awkward and a bit nerdy, with a passion for historic canals, in this case the long lost Ogley and Huddersfield Canal, and introduce him to another eccentric who is passionate about his own family history with its feuds and betrayals. Said eccentric is Samuel Longden who claims to be related to Chris Buckley, said loner who loves canals, but who isn’t interested in genealogy. Not until, that is, he finds out that Samuel has been killed in suspicious circumstances. Then he starts to take the documents Samuel has given him to research more seriously.

Imagine you think you are the last of a line and that you don’t really have any relatives. That’s what Buckley thought. And if you can’t read people that well and aren’t comfortable around most people in any case, then that’s perhaps a good way to be. ‘Relationless’. Except, Buckley finds out he isn’t. When all kinds of new people come crashing into his life and other nasty things start to happen at the same time, he might be wondering about whom he can trust.

If your family history is anything as twisted and mysterious as Samuel Longden and Chris Buckley’s, you wouldn’t need to buy crime thrillers to entertain you on a quiet evening at home or in an airport lounge waiting for French air traffic controllers to call off their latest strike. But you would need to fear for your life, because for some mysterious reason, someone is out to get you, precisely because of a buried family secret, because of something that happened a very long time ago. That is when a hobby becomes a survival skill.

Stephen Booth is the author of the popular Cooper & Fry crime series, but his latest novel, Drowned Lives,  released by Sphere on August 15^th 2019, is a stand-alone that comes in at 424 well written and engrossing pages. But then I like odd balls, canals and family history.

Available in hardback (£20.00), Ebook and Audio.