The latest David Raker thriller from Tim Weaver is true to form. Raker, a widowed former journalist, is an expert finder of missing persons, and the author’s speciality is setting up situations where the impossible has occurred – and then, eventually, presenting us with an explanation that fits, rather like in that classic crime fiction staple, the locked room mystery.

Here, the first mystery is what to make of the two apparently unrelated plot strands. First, we are told of the unexplained disappearance, almost two decades earlier, of a trio of women film makers who vanished while working on a story about Porthtreno, an abandoned Cornish village. More immediately, Raker is hired by a wealthy actress, Ellie Snyder to find out how and why her husband has disappeared from an exclusive private clinic where he was undergoing cosmetic surgery.

Both Raker and his assistant, ex Met Copper Colm Healy labour under the shadow of personal grief; Raker for his wife Derryn, taken by cancer, and Healy for his daughter Leanne, slain by a serial killer. Readers familiar with Tim Weaver’s style have come to expect seemingly unconnected and unexplained changes in narrative. Here, on page 125 of 437, after a second-by-second account of Raker and Healy investigating the disappearance of Preston Stewart, we are introduced, seemingly out of nowhere, to Zauna and Marco. Who they? You might well ask, but you will just have to strap in and wait for all to be revealed. This, of, course is the essential segue between the abducted surgeon to the missing women of Cornwall. Is it clunky? Yes. But does it work? Affirmative, likewise. The clincher comes when Raker and Healy are searching Preston Stewart’s house and they find a book, and a link to a YouTube video, both called The Lost Women of Porthtreno.

Central to the plot is a jailed serial killer known as Dr Glass.”It was in that forest, out in east London, that six women had been found in clear plastic coffins filled with liquid formaldehyde. A seventh had been found in a wall cavity nearby, and Glass had kept all of them hidden in a disused sewer network 30 feet under the earth.” Along the way, we also learn that on one drunken occasion, out of nowhere, Preston Stewart had confessed to Ellie that he had been involved in a murder, back in his student days in Bristol. We also know that the mysterious Marco, also a student in Bristol, went missing, never to be found. And one of the Porthtreno film makers was …. wait for it …. His sister Zauna.

A policeman who has been involved in the case sums up everything that is implausible about David Raker, and yet he also puts his finger on why the books are best sellers.

“From what I know about you, from what I’ve seen myself, you’re smart, intuitive, and I genuinely believe you’re a good man. But you’re out of touch. It’s been a long time since you worked within any kind of structure, and when the only person you have ever had to be accountable to is yourself, you forget what it’s like in the real world.”

Yes, Raker’s adventures can sometimes verge on comic strip implausibility, but, in the end, this is why we love crime fiction.Tim Weaver goes to the cupboard where crime fiction tropes are stored, and he leaves very few hanging on their pegs. We have corrupt cops, a serial killer with an astonishing ability to create murderous conspiracies from within his jail cell, drugged coffee, devastating explosions triggered by mobile ‘phones, private investigators hired by clients who are actually the principal villains and, last but not least, a central character physically immune to knives, choke holds and high explosives. The Lost Women is, however, a superb thriller, full of twists, turns, red herrings, and great dialogue. It will be published by Michael Joseph on 26th February.