The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton, TP $24.99

I needed something different when I was reading this year. Most years, my selection comes down to what book kept me awake all night reading, or something I wanted to read so much that it was finished even before it got dark.

This year, I needed something that I could take my time with. Something that I could pick up and put down. Something that I would not lose track of if I could only read a few pages at a time, but that welcomed me back to the plot and the characters without excessive backtracking.

I was surprised that the perfect book for that ended up being Stuart Turton's sophomore title, The Devil and the Dark Water. A whodunit mystery set on a Dutch merchantman bound from India to Amsterdam, Turton has written something that can be picked up and put down with the same amount of enjoyment. Turton is a scholar of the genre, so I was delighted to find nearly every archetype of the detective appear not just as characters but as suspects. The detective duo, the noblewoman female amateur, the child genius, the not always been a priest priest, and others all make up the passengers and crew. He mixes historical mystery with the mystic; upstairs downstairs with the travelling locked room, with a dash of swashbuckling humor to boot.

It sounds like too many things, but Turton's skill as a writer keeps the ship afloat and the story moving. And during a period in which decisions are hard, and it is even harder to decide what we want to distract us, what better than a book that has a little bit of everything?