So this is one of those books that I feel I'm not capable of giving a full comprehensive review. For one I had no Idea about this Fractured Europe before I got 20% into this book. After that there were plenty of changes from the original timeline that I think flew way over my head. I will say that the one thing that really caught my eye was how he managed to include an alternate more devastating Covid in this story. But other than that this was a pretty dry read for me. I didn't feel like I could empathize with any of these characters and I found the ending to be unsatisfactory. Maybe if I knew more about this universe I could have enjoyed this a lot more. Sadly I haven't and don't really feel like getting into them.

Thank you to NetgGalley and Rebellion for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

2 stars out of 5.

A dazzling, visionary and original thriller of future espionage, broken borders, and impossible secrets. Immersive and revelatory and a pleasure to read!

I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.

First things first - this book wasn't really for me. I don't think I fall in the intended audience age-wise, and I constantly felt lost since I hadn't read the author's other works set in this same world. I thought I could read it alone since it is a new series, but I felt a lack of worldbuilding.

However, even if I personally wasn't invested, I can still observe that the plot was well-done and that there were some funny dialogue moments. Hence the 3 stars. The story was solid!

The plot, while a tad meandering and constantly visiting past experiences, did have a sustained momentum forward in figuring out what happened to Maksim. I also wasn't sure that the multiple POVs were going to pan out to be important to the story, but one of them did end up giving some interesting background. The other, we could have done without, in my opinion.

Carey was interesting as a main character. She's a little jaded, a little blunt, a little emotionally stunted. Her narration is colored by some hurts in her past, and she draws empathy. I just want her to be able to retire and stop dealing with other people's silly crap (ie, Maksim). Other than Carey, though, Magda may have been the strongest character, and she's not even there until like 50% through. Cold Water is not a character-focused book.

I do feel like I missed a lot of the pop culture references. However, I found some of the dialogue particularly funny. All of which may indicate that my humor is that of a 50 year old woman but I do not have the cultural knowledge to actually be a 50 year old woman. Oh, well.

There was a lot happening in the book, but the action wasn't overwhelming. It felt like a cozy mystery-esque/spy novel read, very easy to pick up and put down as needed. I thought the ending came together nicely!

I would recommend this to fans of the author or those who enjoy light spy + light dystopian novels!

Cold Water is a return to the world of Hutchinson's Fractured Europe, some time after the events of Europe in Autumn, Europe At Midnight, Europe at Dawn and Europe in Winter. It doesn't assume any familiarity with those, although if you are you'll be rewarded by posting some referencing and of course you will have a head start in understanding the background. This is a world devastated by a viral plague; a world where the states of Europe have fragmented into statelets, free towns and pocket republics; and a world interpenetrated by alternate, pocket universes.

Against that background, we're given a twisty, tense and involving thriller mixing espionage, crime and derring-do. Carey Tews, a woman form the Republic of Taxes, has retired from the shadowy network Les Coureurs. She reckons she's getting too old for the work, and besides, her cover blown by what happened in Hungary (don't talk to her about Hungary!) But like Smiley of old, she's invited back to carry out One Last Job when her recruiter, mentor, and sometime lover, Maksim, gets himself killed in a little Polish town that's winding up to declare independence.

The story also follows Krista, a young Estonian police woman, whose investigation into a gangster's operations in Tallinn is rudely interrupted by scandal from the past, by way of Russian agents, a drunken journalist, and a crew of juvenile hackers and forgers who get you any credentials you might need. As always with Hutchinson's books the detail and plotting is meticulous, creating set-ups and pay-offs that are just so good, they could hang as works of art in any museum. There are mysteries here - so I am being vague about what actually happens - and they're fiendishly nested mysteries, so that while I spotted one or two points coming, the how and the why of their fit with the wider story absolutely took me by surprise.

There are some superb characters here too. Carey is just magnificent, a richly portrayed, complex woman who - whatever she believes - is at the top of her game. I love reading stories in which competent, experienced people meet difficult challenges head on: books where you have a sense that there is just so much happening - real danger combined with plausible, calculated courses of action... which don't always come off.

Depicting all that background doesn't make the story slow, not at all - there is plenty going on here from the start, which opens with a clandestine meet that wouldn't be out of place in the (old style, TV) Mission: Impossible, to the conclusion - a tense, high stakes confrontation at a deserted border post. The pace never lets up, with the parts dealing with Carey's history actually adding tension because - as we empathise more and more with her - we see just how impossible is the task she's undertaken (and why she didn't want it).

(In passing, I was particularly impressed by the way that is able to leverage the experience of covid to locate his story even more sharply in the imagined future (middle of the 21st century?) His "Xian 'flu" isn't covid, it is even more devastating - and it was mentioned in the earlier books. Still, the experience of lockdown, of helplessness as friends and loved ones succumb and the reality that things have changed, is deep in the DNA of this book making very real speculative fiction).

Vastly enjoyable, fun, and sharply observed. Read it.

Dave Hutchinson returns to Fractured Europe with a new novel that doesn’t feature Rudi and instead picks up on a very minor character from Europe In Winter. The flavour is the same though - it’s insanely complicated, and will make your head hurt as you try to keep the various timelines, sides, motives, and schemes straight. But it doesn’t really matter if you can, because confusing or not it’s so very readable and the journey is terrific fun even if you have no idea what the destination is. These books really are some of the best espionage fiction being written today, and deserve the same broadsheet kudos as a Mick Herron.

It was the first book I read by Dave Hutchinson and it was a strange experience: it's quite realistic but it's also visionary, well plotted and a bit disturbing at times.
There's a lot of different ideas in my head but I think it's one of those book that can only be judged on a personal level.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

The book seems well-written and well-thought-out. Unfortunately, I can't connect it and started to feel like forcing myself to finish it. I decided to DNF it for now, but I want to emphasize it's the case of "It's me, not you" DNF :)

Thanks to the publisher for giving me the possibility to try it. I may give it another try soon.

This is the first story of Dave Hutchinson's that I've read and so it may be a strange time to pick up, on this off-branch of a separate set of stories - But while some of the details may have been clearer with the world-building, I still found the novel quite entertaining and left me wanting to explore more.

The hopping around a heavily segmented Europe and a post-pandemic world feels slightly more realistic than it may have done previously and things move along pretty fast-paced, as the journalists and coureurs put the pieces together. The characters have a range of personalities to get stuck into and while some elements of the plot were tidied up, I did feel like there was more to know and the prospect that this also develops into a bigger story of it's own.

I think if you are a fan of thrillers and a bit of sci-fi, you'll find a lot to enjoy here.

An unexpected return to the world of Hutchinson's Fractured Europe quartet, and one which can't entirely dodge the problem of writing near-future SF in uncertain times: your future can very easily start looking like an offshoot timeline instead as the conditions in which it was founded shift. Yes, the Xian flu pandemic in the setting's past now looks prescient, and gets fleshed out more here than I think we've seen before, heavily informed by our own recent experience (arguably too much so, given how much deadlier it was than the 2020s' rather feeble pathogen). The line about "the hopefulness of the early days after the flu, when things had seemed new and people tried to rebuild their shattered lives and all things had seemed possible because they had just survived an apocalypse" falls especially flat; it feels like something written in early to mid-2021, when some people were still mug enough to be talking about a new roaring twenties, and not revised in light of the ongoing, exhausting clusterfuck since. As for the core notion of Brexit and plague kicking off a cascade failure of the borderless European project, that now seems considerably further-fetched than it did, not least because everyone else has seen what a basket case it's left Britain. Sure, there are still independence movements, but they seem to be looking for greater autonomy while remaining within the European framework, rather than throwing up the border posts and barbed wire. This side of the Atlantic, at any rate; one of Cold Water's smarter moves is an increasing focus on what's happening in America, where it's easier by the day to believe that the Union can't last. Similarly, much of the plot revolves around the Russians sneakily destabilising neighbouring countries they still regard as part of their empire, and while the smarmy, knowingly unconvincing denials (which some people who should know better nevertheless accept) are note-perfect, the quiet, efficient information warfare would have been a lot more plausible last year than it is now, after eight months of open shitzkrieg.

Putting all of which collisions of established worldbuilding with chaotic world to one side, does it deliver as a continuation of the established series' mood? Yes and no. There are mysterious Coureur schemes, wheels within wheels, further developments of the setting's stranger side – though as with the initial books, you get a fair way in before that bit comes to light, and for a while early on I was wondering if it even needed to be a Fractured Europe book rather than a stand-alone espionage thriller. But while some characters from before recur, I found it difficult entirely investing in the protagonists here, of whom there are three, though it took me too long even to get that clear, as I spent a while thinking that they were the same woman at different stages in her life – the seldom-seen Reverse Fifth Season, if only it had been deliberate. Two of the three are journalists, two of the three are in Tallinn, all have a certain outsider quality and bloody-mindedness – and Hutchinson exacerbates the issue by often beginning chapters 'She...', and only giving names once we're underway. One of them fades out altogether well before the end, reduced to a background figure; even for the other two, what could have been distinguishing features are left in abeyance, so we're well into the latter half before there's much mileage made out of the fact that Carey (the Texan ex-Coureur dragged back in by an ex's apparent death, and the most engaging of the trio) has an advantage in spycraft through the invisibility women of a certain age attain. The weird thing is that it's only the POV characters thus afflicted; for people they see, as with places, Hutchinson retains an enviable ability to fix them in your mind with a quick, deft pen-portrait – but who and what the protagonists are seems more elusive than who and what they see.

About three quarters of the way through, there's a sudden flurry of gnomic lampshading with lines like "Life is not a thriller, where everything is neatly tied up at the end", which put in place the suspicion that the ending might not be entirely satisfying, and so it proves, even such resolution as we do get verging on a shaggy dog story. There's a gesture in the direction of a theme regarding genuinely awful men camouflaging themselves as loveably awful men, but it doesn't feel sufficiently developed to carry much, and the new wrinkles in the setting have a definite sense of diminishing returns, even as they hint at another layer of the onion. Possibly this all indicates that the book is setting up a new series, though if so the titles certainly aren't looking as resonant as first time around, when the name Europe In Autumn was what first got my attention. What next, Fizzy Water, then Hot Water, and finally Still Water? The maddening thing is, I will still probably read them anyway, so for all my complaints he must be doing something right.

(Netgalley ARC)

Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson kept me so engrossed.

Such a good and different read. I couldn't be happier with this one.
The storyline was very well written Dave kept me engaged from start to finish.
The characters, Carey made the story feel that much real and I enjoyed getting to go on this wild journey with her.
In my opinion I felt this was a fast-paced story.
The writing style kept me hooked and I didn't find myself losing any interest.
The author did a great job setting the scene. The setting was on point.
I was very much entranced by Cold Water.
And I look forward to reading more of this Authors work in the future.

"I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own."

Rebellion/Solaris,
Thank You for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!