Author: Sam Llewellyn
Title: The Shadow in the Sands
ISBN: 0747260052
Sam Llewellyn won me over with The Sea Garden, and I’ve been a fan of his books every since. On the first page of The Shadow in the Sands, he writes: Being an account of the cruise of the yacht Gloria in the Frisian Islands in the April of 1903, and the conclusion of the events described by Erskine Childers in his narrative The Riddle of the Sands.
As Llewellyn says, this book is set mainly in the shallow and treacherous waters around the Frisian Islands in 1903, and told mostly through the eyes of Charlie Webb, professional yacht skipper in summer, fisherman in winter. Blackmailed into taking on the job of skippering a yacht through the Frisians with a mysterious and violent passenger supposedly looking for sunken treasure, Charlie keeps a sharp eye out and his thoughts to himself. Fortunately, as the reader, we get to hear them, though. His views on life, and in particular the class differences of the time, are riveting, and the plot twists and turns as much as the tide in what I’d describe as an edge-of-the-seat spy thriller.
