fullybooked2017

Joseph Knox made his name with a deadly dark trilogy of police procedural novels featuring Manchester copper Aidan Waits (click to read the reviews) and followed these with the standalone True Crime Story. His latest novel takes a leaf out of the book of Josephine Tey, whose novel  Brat Farrar (1949) many consider to be her finest work. That novel was inspired by a real case, known as The Tichborne Claimant, where a New South Wales butcher claimed that he was Roger Tichborne, heir to a huge fortune, but who  was supposed to have perished in a shipwreck. The butcher, Arthur Orton, was eventually found guilty of fraud in 1874 and given a long jail sentence.

Here, we meet Lynch, a young English conman. He flies out of Paris, with only the cheap suit he is standing up in, with no money, no prospects and only the bitter memory of his latest failed venture on his mind. En route, he meets a milfy heiress called Bobbie Pierce who mistakes him for her long lost brother, Heydon. Lynch immediately corrects her mistake, but is intrigued. Heydon is assumed to be dead. No trace of him has been found since his abandoned car was found on a Thames bridge five years earlier. Bobbie is something a ship foundering on storm tossed rocks, as she is on her way to yet another expensive bout of rehab in the States. She sends him a text message which contains the key codes to her parents’ house, and suggests that, as he is broke and pretty much down and out, he might find plenty of valuable items in the house to relieve his immediate Micawberish state.

Lynch, as much out of curiosity as anything else, goes to the house but, once inside, he is detained by security men. He then meets Miranda Pierce, the family matriarch and former film star, and Bobbie’s sister Reagan. Lynch makes no claim to be the missing Heydon, but Miranda has a use for him. Just before he disappeared, Heydon Lynch borrowed money from a loan shark called Bagwan, and left a case containing family items as security. Badwan has contacted the family, calling in the loan – now greatly inflated. Miranda and Reagan want Lynch, posing as  Heydon, to meet Badwan, pay him off, and recover the  case.

The case is recovered, and one of the things it contains is Heydon’s phone. Through what it contains, Lynch learns two things: one, Heydon Pierce was convinced he was being targeted by some shadowy organisation; two, he had become involved with a man calling himself Vincent Control, basically a conman trying to lure gullible people into a crypto currency scam. Lynch confronts Control and learns that there was, indeed, some dark security agency involved, but their conversation is interrupted by a masked gunman. Control is shot dead, but Lynch escapes.

At this point, half way through the book, I did ask myself why Lynch didn’t just disappear. He now has plenty of money, having being richly rewarded by Miranda Pierce, so why not simply get away, maybe fly back to Paris on his forged passport, and use his new-found wealth to fund another project designed to separate fools from their money? He then sets out his reasons. He has discovered that he is dealing with some very powerful and resourceful people who, he figures, will be able to find him and settle scores wherever he goes, and however long it takes.

The plot is of Chandleresque complexity, as Lynch ducks and dives  between various encounters which prove fatal for some of the characters. He suspects first one person, and then another, as he tries to find exactly why he was hired in the first place, and what actually happened to Haydon Pierce. The truth is only revealed to him (and us) in the final pages of the book.

This is a clever, tense and nervy thriller, which dwells on betrayal and the pernicious effect that the misuse of digital communications and media can have on human lives. Lynch is a long way from being an admirable character, but his street-smarts and survivalist instincts are straight out of the How To Be A Conman instruction manual.. Imposter Syndrome was published by Doubleday on 11th July.