The North Water

Starred review from February 22, 2016
McGuire’s novel is a dark, brilliant yarn set on a 19th-century Yorkshire whaler in the dead of winter. An ex-army surgeon named Patrick Sumner, his reputation ruined by an ignoble incident in wartime India, seeks to escape his past by shipping out as doctor on the whaling ship Volunteer, bound for the Arctic Circle. But the voyage to the waters north of the British Isle is doomed from the beginning: the men responsible for the ship have no intention of bringing it back in one piece. And if that weren’t enough, a debauched murderer named Henry Drax is aboard. The harpooners meet with some success while at sea, whaling, sealing, and capturing a bear cub, but a test of wills begins after the mutilated body of a cabin boy is discovered below deck in a cask used to store minced-up whale blubber. Sumner challenges the suspected culprit, violence ensues, and soon the ship is without leadership. The frozen seas threaten to cripple the ship, and what’s left of the crew tries desperately to survive the worst of the winter trapped in the ice. There is no light, no letup in this gruesome tale, so there is great significance in the rare but moving acts of kindness and camaraderie between these men in peril. An amazing journey.

February 1, 2016
For a whaling ship out of Hull, England, bad luck and evil men turn an 1859 expedition into a nightmare. Henry Drax sets the tone in the opening pages, emerging from a harbor bordello, murdering a man for not buying him a drink, and killing a boy who might be leading him into an ambush. Drax is a harpooner among the 40-man crew of the Volunteer, a ship doomed before it sails. Capt. Brownlee has agreed with the owner to wreck the vessel for insurance when it reaches the North Water in Baffin Bay. Much of the action is seen through the eyes of ship's surgeon Patrick Sumner, who has a laudanum habit and carries a dark secret from his service with the British military in India. He plays detective when a cabin boy is sodomized and later murdered, eventually discovering one of the victim's teeth in Drax's arm. The vicious Drax also murders Brownlee and two Eskimo hunters who help the crew when the ship is wrecked and the sailors camp on ice. Along with human menace and mayhem, McGuire (Incredible Bodies, 2007) serves up gruesome descriptions of the killing of a whale and a polar bear. A bear rips off a man's arm. A man shelters from the cold in a freshly gutted polar bear. And for good measure, a man's intestinal abscess is operated on with stomach-turning detail. McGuire delivers not only arresting depictions of bloody destruction, but moments of fine prose that recall Seamus Heaney's harsh music, as when an iceberg is described as "an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor." For noirish thrills in an unusual setting, McGuire has the goods and the gore, but this book--graphic in its violence, language, and sexual references--is not for the squeamish.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
When Patrick Sumner returns to England from India, after serving as an army surgeon in the Sepoy Rebellion (185758), he finds himself with few options, having been expunged from the service. Lacking other prospects, he signs on as ship surgeon for a whaling expedition onboard the Volunteer. The rough accommodations aren't any worse than those he suffered in India, and the crew's minor injuries are easy work compared to tending battle-mangled soldiers. But when he treats a cabin boy displaying evidence of horrific abuse, Sumner hunts the predator onboard, even after it costs the cabin boy his life. Henry Drax is popular and unmatched when it comes to harpooning, but he's miscalculated his power and put too much faith in his shipmates' apathy. Sumner uses his medical knowledge and a dose of forensics to accuse Drax as the ship navigates the Arctic Sea dangerously close to winter, and a disaster leaves them fighting nature and each other for survival. McGuire's tale is every bit as raw, suspenseful, and brutal as befits a Victorian whaling expedition with a psychopathic killer. But like Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves (2006) and Dan Simmons' Drood (2009), there is plenty of literary heft in this novel's thoughtfully developed characters, absorbing period details, and detailed renderings of dangerously beautiful settings. This deserves attention beyond readers of crime and historical fiction, especially from those stalking provocative book-group fare.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)