Shoal Water is a 1940 novel by the English author Dornford Yates (Cecil William Mercer).

It was first serialised in Blue Book between July and October 1940, as When The Devil Drives, with illustrations by Austin Briggs.

Jeremy Solon (narrator) falls in with Katherine Scrope and learns she has been blackmailed into doing duty as a carrier for jewel thieves.

She is kidnapped, and Solon and his companions – now including Jonathan Mansel – set out to rescue her.

"[2] Mercer's biographer AJ Smithers, writing in 1982, noted that this novel and the preceding one, Gale Warning, are written to a pattern, though one that is cunningly woven.