‘Black Water Rising’ by Sean Watkin

Published by Canelo,
10 April 2025. 
ISBN: 978-1-83598-130-6 (PB)

Black Water Rising is a surprisingly accomplished and assured debut novel by Sean Watkin, the first of his proposed series of ‘DCI de Silva Crime Thrillers’. It is set in the author’s home city of Liverpool and opens with the discovery of a teenage girl named Kelly Stack in the dock area – one side of her head bashed in, and her naked body half submerged in the waters of the Mersey.

The girl’s death is to be investigated by two detectives: DCI Winifred de Silva and DS Bernard Barclay. De Silva, a talented, highly respected officer with considerable experience, is at an unfortunate juncture in her life. Her husband has killed himself three months earlier, and she is consumed by guilt, attributing his suicide to his finding out she was having an affair. Trapped in a destructive cycle of self-medicating with alcohol and generally letting herself go, her future career in the police force is on the line.

Barclay, meanwhile, is facing his own demons. He is gay, happily married to Nick and the proud parent of a little girl named Sarah, but worries he was taken on as a diversity hire and, even worse, that he lacks the intuitive skills that will enable him to solve Kelly’s murder. It is a matter of some urgency as she is the third teenage girl in the Liverpool area to go missing in recent months. Although the two detectives have no romantic interest in each other, they make a good professional team, with Barclay the partner content to occupy himself with plodding research and de Silva invaluable for her insights into the mentality and motives of a killer.

Interspersed with episodes about Barclay and de Silva wrestling with their problems while racing against time to find a murderer fixated on blondes in their teens before he strikes again, we are treated to a glimpse of the mind of the perpetrator. From a dysfunctional family, he hates all women as liars who betray him. He grew up without a father and was mercilessly abused at a religious boarding school he was placed in by his cruelly indifferent mother. As an adult, he derives sexual thrills from the prospect of kidnapping, raping and murdering girls, seeing it as pleasurable revenge for a rejection he had suffered as a boy at the hands of his first love. Two more girls go missing, and the pressure steadily increases for de Silva and Barclay to nab the culprit.

Black Water Rising is a gripping thriller written in competent prose marred only by the author’s having chosen to privilege character over plot: that is, the personalities of his two protagonists. While we are treated to a fascinating examination of their complicated personal lives, there is not much in the way of exciting scenes of the killer finding and grabbing his victims or the impact of their murders on their families and local communities. Still, Watkin is to be commended and encouraged for producing such a promising start to his proposed new series.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Sean Watkin was born and raised in Liverpool and studied a BA and MA in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. He has been shortlisted for Fresher Writing Award, Book a Break Prize and Bristol Short Story Prize. His writing has been featured in The Gay UK magazine, and The Content Wolf e-zine, as well as other LGBT+ publications. Sean lives in Liverpool with his partner. His debt novel Black Water Rising was published in April 2025.  

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.