Product Description

Edinburgh, 2025 - sweat city. Global warming has led to strict water rationing. The ruling Council of City Guardians has been forced to become more user-friendly - so citizens now live for the weekly lottery draw. Then people start dying after drinking poisoned whisky, and subversive, blues-haunted investigator Quintilian Dalrymple is thrown into a nightmare case which threatens the Council's very existence. For Quint, distinguishing friend from foe soon becomes a question of life or death. And the body count, like the temperature, keeps on rising...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2698370 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

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.

From Booklist
The third Quintilian Dalrymple mystery (following Body Politic [BKL Jl 99] and The Bone Yard [BKL Jl 00]) is sure to captivate fans of Johnston's intelligent, thought-provoking series. The story, concerning a series of murders in early-twenty-first-century Scotland, chronicles the continuing evolution of Edinburgh, an ill-conceived, would-be utopia that seems a rather unappealing place to live. Dalrymple, a former member of the City Guard (now he's an independent investigator), narrates the novel; what we see through his eyes looks like an updated version of Brave New World. It's a world in which citizens get their furniture from the Supply Directorate; in which police officers are known by the barracks they live in (Quint's sidekick is a fellow called Hume 253); in which religion, literature, and music are strictly regulated. The contradiction inherent in any utopia--achieving peace and harmony by the suppression or elimination of individuality--is played for all its worth in the Dalrymple novels, and what makes the series particularly enjoyable is the way things keep changing. Edinburgh is a utopia on the verge of crumbling, a "perfect city" that can't decide what its rules are. This is the best installment yet in an excellent series and a fine example of the futuristic crime novel. Those new to Johnston's world may want to start with the first two Dalrymple adventures, if only to reap maximum enjoyment from this one. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

interesting sf mystery
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