An Interview with Leonora Nattrass

Longlisted for Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2023 for Blue Water

Longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2023, Leonora Nattrass joins Harrogate International Festivals and host Joe Haddow, to talk about her book, Blue Water.

New Year 1795, and Laurence Jago is aboard the Tankerville mail ship, en route to Philadelphia. Laurence is travelling undercover, supposedly as a journalist’s assistant. But his real mission is to protect a civil servant, en route to Congress with a vital treaty that will stop the Americans from joining the French in their war against Britain. When the civil servant meets an unfortunate – and apparently accidental – end, the treaty disappears, and Laurence realises that only he can keep the Americans out of the war. Trapped on the ship with a strange assortment of travellers including two penniless French aristocrats, an Irish actress and a dancing bear, Laurence must hunt down both the lost treaty and the murderer, before he has a tragic ‘accident’ himself…

A little more about the author…

Leonora Nattrass studied eighteenth-century literature and politics, and spent ten years lecturing in English and publishing works on William Cobbett. She lives in Cornwall, in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts, writing historical fiction and spinning the fleeces of her Ryeland sheep into yarn. Her first novel, Black Drop, was published in 2021 and was selected as one of the best historical novels of the year by the Sunday Times.