THE DEVIL AND THE DARK WATER by Stuart Turton (Raven £8.99, 574pp) Stuart Turton won a Costa First Novel award for his genre-busting debut, The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle. His second novel is an equally vibrant mix of history, fantasy and detective fiction, set in 1634 aboard the Saardam, a ship transporting a colonial governor of the Dutch East India company to Amsterdam. Also aboard the ship is Samuel Pipps, a famous detective who helped the governor recover a mysterious scientific object but is now chained in a tiny cell, and Pipps’s bodyguard, Arent Hayes, as huge and ugly as Pipps is small and handsome.