THE Devil's Ark is a spine-tingling debut novel by Stephen Bywater, who has been a long-time visitor to Dartmouth for over 40 years since he was a small boy. Some 17 years ago, he brought his wife, Lucy, and their eldest daughter Matilda to the town and they have been coming back ever since. He so loves Dartmouth, he has even persuaded his mother-in-law Niki and her partner Steve to move here. Last week, Stephen found yet another good excuse to return when he took part in a book signing at the Dartmouth Community Bookshop. The novel, the first in a two-book deal by Headline publishers, has already had rave reviews on Amazon. The dark historical thriller with a supernatural twist is set in Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq, in the 1920s during an archaeological dig. Christopher Golden, the New York Times best-selling author of Snowblind, described it as 'creepy, classy... full of dread and lust and echoing with the sorrows of war'. Stephen, who is head of English at Bedford Modern School, summed it up as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile meets The Exorcist.