The Drowning Guard

A Novel of the Ottoman Empire

By: Linda Lafferty

Narrated by: Suzanne Cypress

Each morning in the hour before dawn, a silent boat launches on the Bosphorous, moving swiftly into the deepest part of the waters halfway between Europe and Asia, where a man will die....

In a gender reversal of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights: Tales from a 1,001 Nights, Ottoman princess Esma Sultan seduces a different Christian lover each night, only to have him drowned in the morning. The Sultaness's true passion burns only for the Christian-born soldier charged with carrying out her brutal nightly death sentence: her drowning guard, Ivan Postivich.

The Drowning Guard explores the riddle of Esma - who is at once a murderer and a champion and liberator of women - and the man who loves her in spite of her horrifying crimes. This textured historical novel, set in the opulence and squalor of Istanbul in 1826, is woven with the complexity and consequences of love.

©2013 Linda Lafferty (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Culture Enlightment

Easy on the senses. Feel good novel. Great narrator. Hard to find negatives for an exotic love story from another time & place.

Wonderful book!!!

I read this book when it first came out but have now decided to review all of my books on Audible.
This book was magnificent!!
I absolutely LOVE this author and have read and / or listened to every single book she has published!
While this is my second favorite of hers, The Bloodletter's Daughter will always be my favorite. I have listened to that one more times than i'd care to admit!
I highly recommend this book and all others by this author. You won't be sorry!!

loved it!

I felt I was right there with the characters. it makes me want to check into more of the works by this author.

Historic Storytelling At Its Best!

The authoress has woven an intricate and lush tapestry of fully fledged competing characters that maintains the reader/listener’s attention from the first line to the last.

The audiobook is so well performed that I can’t imagine “merely” reading it. Likewise I can’t imagine anyone performing it better. I highly recommend this audiobook to anyone who enjoys historic fiction or simply a ripping good yarn.

enjoyed listening

narrator was easy to hear and listen to. entertaining story. love and violence what more could you ask for.
#exciting, #romance, #violence, #tagsgiving, #sweepstakes

It Got Better

I’ve been looking for works on the Ottoman Empire and this was my first piece of fiction. When I started this audio book however, it took longer to adjust to than normal. I would say perhaps like with a normal read, I needed that cushion of 40-50 pages to truly start to care about this place and these characters. There were definitely certain things I felt were left unresolved for no apparent reason, but did enjoy the back drop. My only major issue were there were several constant repeated words that become annoying to hear. The repetition was unneeded after a certain point in the book and seemed as though the author had no other way to describe nouns. However, I will conceded that part of my issue may lie with the narrator. Overall, enjoyed the story and the ending notes kept my interest piqued for more Ottoman knowledge.

Quite a surprise

I purchased this book on sale and have had it in my library for a while until a few days ago when I finally decided to listen to it. I found the story fascinating. I'm not sure why the two reviews on Audible were poor but the Amazon reviewers seemed to really enjoy the book. Historically accurate to it's time and well developed characters were two strong points about this book. The love story also was very believable and I absolutely loved the giant hero's good and evil sides. He was far from perfect but that is what made him so real especially for his time. The only weak point to the story was, in my opinion, it's ending. Without giving it away, I was hoping for an even better ending. The entire story got built to the end and then I felt a bit let down. I guess I wanted more. More of the happily ever after and not a short two minute clean up session. Other than that I truly enjoyed this book.

Good story

Hated the narrator, I will never listen to anything from her again! The story was good, with a lot of potential, but other then the harem stories it was hard to get into and I was not emotionally invested in any of the characters.

They're on the sale list for a reason...

I did not learn one thing about the Ottoman Empire and it wasn't much of a romance either. The first 10 hours killed me and the last 8 minutes were fair! I am going to stick with authors I know when a sale pops up.

Terrible

I forced myself to finish this book all the way to the very end, in the sad hope that at some point the plot/characters would be explained and everything would make sense and come together. It didn't. Even given the low low expectations that I set for 'romance' books this one was bad. I'd say that the plot was lacking, but that implies there was something resembling a plot. It seemed early on that the book was going to be about how Ivan falls in love with Esma as she tells him how she came to murder all her lovers. Nope. Not to spoil things, but nothing is every explained. Why does the sultan murder all Esma's lovers? Why, if she feels as bad as she seems to, does she continue to take lovers knowing they are going to be murdered? The whole premise makes no sense. There is zero chemistry between the two main characters, mostly because they aren't realistic characters in any way shape or form.

Rather than filling up the ten hours with plot, the author has fallen into the historical fiction writing trap of describing irrelevant things that may or may not be interesting but have nothing really to do with the plot that she learned while doing research. Pointless descriptions and odd tangents fill up most of the time in this book.

The only good thing about this book was the narrator, who did as good a job as she could with the material she was given.

Bottom line: don't waste your money, not even if its on sale.