The blackwater - Paul Smith

Two stories. One harrowing tale.

Switching between 2014 and the Battle of Maldon, AD 991, the past and present collide as history repeats itself.

After failing to take his own life, Will, a senior detective in the Met., finds himself back in Maldon, his hometown, where he assumes a less demanding role as a uniformed police officer. Later becoming embroiled in a murder inquiry, he discovers a connection to his last, unsolved drugs trafficking case.

Over a millennium earlier, as a fleet of dragon ships enter the Blackwater, Wilhelm, an Anglo-Saxon salter, hunts for his loved one. But if he is to save her, he will first have to survive a bloody conflict with the Norsemen at the Battle of Maldon, a one-sided encounter the English are fated to lose.

Unbeknown to Will, an unbreakable bond bridges time to connect present with past. And if he is to identify the killer and drug traffickers before it is too late, he will need to stray from the path to which fate has called him. It seems nothing can deviate him from his preordained path to death - nothing except an apparition, whose timely appearances from beyond the grave are all that stand between him and his fate.