Thriller

NOBODY’S FOOL . . . Between the covers

In the last Harlan Coben book I read, Think Twice, the DNA of a man who died decades ago turns up at a recent murder scene. Coben loves these ‘impossible’ scenarios, and here, he sets us another one. When he was on a gap year trip to Europe twenty-two years earlier, Sami Kierce had a passionate fling in a Spanish resort with a young fellow American called Anna. It all ended grimly when, after yet another evening fueled by booze, drugs and sex, Sami wakes, as usual, in Anna’s arms. Problem. He is covered in Anna’s blood and clutching a knife.

Now, Sami, thrown off the police force for various indiscretions, scratches a living as a PI in New York, also turning a more-or-less honest buck giving evening classes in criminology to a bunch of weirdos. When one of his classes is joined by a woman who, if not Anna is, surely, a clone, Sami does a classic double-take. So many questions, already. First up is how Sami managed to get back Stateside after the Costa del Sol incident with Anna. We do find out, eventually. Second is how ‘Anna’ appears to be living in a Connecticut mansion, deep in a forest and protected by armed heavies and belligerent dogs.

As if having one dramatic backstory weren’t enough, Sami has two. Before he had to throw in his badge, Sami was engaged to a fellow officer, Nicole Brett. Then she was murdered by a nasty piece of work called Tad Grayson, who was arrested, tried, and given a life term. But now, thanks to nifty footwork by his legal team, Grayson is out, and determined to prove that he did not kill Nicole. All of which, naturally enough, does not improve Sami’s sunny demeanour. ‘Anna’ is actually Victoria Belmond who, back in the day featured in the mother-and-father of all ‘missing heiress’ stories. Victoria disappeared on New Years Eve after a party, and what happened in the next eleven years – until she turned up sitting in a corner booth of a Maine diner – remains a mystery. Victoria was – literally – mute for many months thereafter and even, when speech returned, remembered nothing of where she had been and with whom.

After his abortive attempt to follow ‘Anna‘ on the night she came to his class, Sami has become a person of interest to the Belmond family and, much to his surprise, he is offered a small fortune to do what the police and FBI failed to do – discover the truth about Victoria’s disappearance. He even uses the Belmond’s largesse to take a quick trip to Spain along with wife Molly and their baby son, and here he finds the police officer who dealt with the case back in the day. He learns that he was the victim of a very clever scam involving ‘Anna’ and her drug hustling boyfriend.

Just when this particular reader was reflecting that this was just one more engaging – but slick and formulaic – American thriller, something truly awful happens and, 308 pages out of 414, everything I thought I understood about the plot is turned on its head. Reviewers are forever trying to think up new metaphors and catchy phrases to explain astonishing plot twists, so all I can say is that this one is up there with the best. I can also say that in the hands of a lesser writer that Harlan Coben, it would probably be a disaster, but he pulls it off with his customary flair. Nobody’s Fool was published by Penguin on 27th March.

March 26, 2025 0

FLOWERS FROM THE BLACK SEA . . . Between the covers

Revenge thrillers come in many shapes and sizes, and Flowers From The Black Sea by AB Decker (left) begins with the main character, a barely competent English security consultant called Matt Quillan travelling to end-of-season Turkey on an all-expenses-paid favour for his old university chum Ben Braithwaite. Quillan’s task appears relatively simple, and it is to locate the whereabouts of a man called Ahmet Karadeniz, last known of in the vicinity of Karakent, a small town on the south coast. Any job is a job as far as Quillan is concerned, and so he fetches up in Karakent and starts to ask questions. However, on his bus journey from Istanbul he meets a mysterious stranger called Rekan, who gives him a USB flash drive for sage keeping. Anyone with a grain of sense would probably have refused, but Quillan takes it, and when the bus is stopped by the police, and Rekan is taken into custody, our man begins to wonder.

After being questioned by the police Quillan is allowed to continue his journey, and soon makes the acquaintance of a local English estate agent, Pearl, and then her sister Amber, who is in town for her annual holiday. Eventually Quillan learns why he has been sent to Turkey. Ben’s sister Peggy married Karadeniz but died in circumstances which were, from a distance, highly suspicious although, according to Muslim custom, Peggy was interred very quickly, and autopsy was ever carried out.

Having reported back to Ben via phone, Quillan is surprised when his wealthy friend arrives in Karakent, aboard his luxury yacht. Quillan is, perhaps, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he is persuaded to stay around while Ben exacts revenge for the untimely death of his sister.

The matter of the flash drive and what it contains is central to the plot. I haven’t been to Turkey since the 1970s, and I won’t pretend that it was an altogether pleasant experience. Yes, countless British holidaymakers go to tourist resorts these days and experience nothing but enjoyment, but these places are pretty much gated off from the real Turkey. Back in the day, we were ‘hippy’ travellers with little cash and, shall we say, we had our moments. Today, Turkey is pretty much an autocracy, and its treatment of minorities such as Kurds and Armenians is often in the news.

This novel is not a sermon about the shortcomings of Muslim societies, but it reference the mistreatment of women in what is predominantly a patriarchal society, by any Western standards. I suppose, aside of the dramatic plot, Decker is simply reasserting what we have known for centuries. Turkey is very much a ‘twixt and between’ place, never sure if it belongs to the urbane West or the visceral certainties of the East.

Long story short, Ben and Matt are captured by gangsters, Ben’s yacht is seized and run aground but, thanks to an intrepid Kurdish nationalist called Leila, the mysterious contents of Rekan’s USB drive, all’s well that ends well. Except it isn’t. Literally in the last paragraph, we have an act of violence that redefines the nature of revenge. Decker has written a convincing and engaging thriller which captures the sense of menace and political uncertainty in a complex country. Published by The Book Guild, it is available now.

November 20, 2024 1

DEATH AT DEAD MAN’S STAKE . . . Between the covers

Death at Dead Man’s Stake sounds like something from the Wild West, but it is, in this new novel by former copper Nick Oldham, an incident at an isolated farm in Lancashire. With his veteran Henry Christie perhaps taking a well-deserved break at his (hopefully) rebuilt moorland pub, Oldham introduces Detective Sergeant Jessica Raker. After fatally shooting a London gangster following a botched raid on a jewellers’ in Greenwich, Raker has been moved to the North West – where she grew up – in an attempt to distance her from the dead man’s vengeful relatives.

Her first day is nothing if not eventful. She has barely unloaded her kit into the Sergeant’s office from her car, when she is called out to a crisis at Dead Man’s Stake. When the local fire brigade attends an unexplained fire in the derelict farmyard, one of the firefighters is grabbed and held hostage by the farmer, a drunken, mildly crazed man called Bill Ramsden. Jessica rescues the fireman after tazering Ramsden. Her day is not over, however. A cantankerous old man, resident of a local cafe home, is found dead, his corpse floating in a nearby reservoir. Raker, viewing the scene, suspects that a physical struggle lead to the old man ending up in the water.

Jessica Raker is a good copper, but she has been dealt a poor hand. At the Greenwich heist, who was one of the customers eying up an expensive item at the moment the robbers burst in? None other than her husband Josh, a high flying player in a City firm. And the piece of jewellery was intended not for Jessica, but for his secretary. Improbably, the marriage has survived, and Josh is now working in Manchester, but resentful at the move.

Meanwhile, we learn a little more about the man Jessica shot dead in Greenwich. He was the most ungovernable of the sons of Billy Moss, a millionaire crook grown rich on the proceeds of all manner of criminaity, ranging from the inevitable drug trade to trafficking people. Goss wants revenge. He wants the hapless amateurs who lured Terry Moss into the doomed jewellery raid, but most of all, he wants Jessica. The problem is that the Met Police have done a very good job in smuggling her away to the Ribble Valley, and she has gone completely off the Moss radar. Nonetheless, a professional killer is hired to hunt her down and end her life. While on the school run, Jessica bumps into an old adversary. Years ago, when she was growing up in Clitheroe Jessica and Maggie Goss fell out over a mutually desired boyfriend, and Maggie, now boss of huge scrapyard empire, hasn’t forgotten the teenage slights. What is more important is that the scrapyard business is a million miles away from being strictly legit, and one of Maggie’s LinkedIn buddies is none other than Billy Moss.

It is not just Nick Oldham’s years of experience as a working copper that makes his books so good. Nor is it the loving and detailed sense of place, where he describes a beautiful and windswept rural Lancashire, blissful yet only an hour’s drive from pockets of deprivation and criminality like Blackpool. For me, what puts his novels up there on a pinnacle is his sense of dialogue – nothing flashy or pretentiously poetic – but an unerring version of how real people actually speak to each other.

As the Moss organisation moves against Jessica Raker, there is a satisfying symmetry to the main plot, as it ends where it began, out at Dead Man’s Stake. This is a firecracker of a police thriller, and Nick Oldham has established a cast of coppers, with Jess Raker at its heart, who will keep us entertained for many years to come. The novel is published by Severn House, and is available now.

September 25, 2024 0

SERAPHIM . . . Between the covers

Seraphim – red-winged angels which, with , are among the first hierarchy of angels next to the throne of God. According to the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, they had six wings, one pair for flying, another covering the face and the third pair covering the feet.

Ben Alder is a Jewish lawyer from Massachusetts, but currently working, with his partner Boris, in post Katrina New Orleans. The pair work for the Public Defender’s Office, meaning they pick up what we in the UK call Legal Aid work. It is badly paid and they deal with people who are at the very bottom end of society. The novel deals with Ben’s attempts to save a father and son from a lifetime in jail. The father, Robert McTell is accused of burglary by going equipped with tools to steal copper pipe from a school abandoned after the destruction of Storm Katrina. His son, Robert Johnson is in much more serious trouble. He has admitted shooting dead a much loved community figure, Lillie Scott, who has been a leading light in the attempts to rehabilitate and rebuild the city after the devastation of the storm. Another savage murder, where four youngsters, were gunned down while they were listening to music in a stationary car, works its way into the story

Reviewers of crime fiction like to put books in genre pigeon holes. If nothing else, it gives potential readers a heads-up about the content and style of a novel. After all, there are thousands of new CriFi books published every year and, for many readers, leisure time is a valuable commodity. I have to say that Seraphim refuses to be categorised. The closest I can get is to call it literary crime fiction. Despite the blurbs, it certainly isn’t a legal thriller. There are no tense courtroom exchanges between defenders and prosecutors. The world Ben Alder inhabits is a dystopia of broken lives, broken homes and broken promises, fogged in a miasma of disillusionment, cynicism and expediency.

One commodity that is notable for its absence in the criminal justice world of New Orleans is truth. Everyone, from the judge down, through legal counsel to the men shackled in cells – lies. Habitually and constantly. The prisoners don’t deal in truth, because experience tells them it will bring only pain. The lawyers’ version of truth is to put a story together that a jury might possibly believe, and this tale can be many miles away from what actually happened.

The timeline of the novel needs you to pay attention. Some sections are the here and now, while others are pre-Katrina. Other events take place far away from New Orleans in places like Memphis, where the homeless are temporarily re-homed. Neither Ben nor readers of this powerful novel ever do find out who shot Lillie Scott. There was certainly another boy, Willard, present on that fateful evening, but in spite of Ben’s elaborate narrative – designed to be told in court – that Willard was smaller and much more clever, and Robert was clinging to him as his only friend, the ‘truth’ never emerges. This, of course, is entirely in keeping with the premise of the novel, which is basically that there is no such thing as truth. Ben, shyly homosexual, even invents two mythical sons so that he can throw them into conversations to boost rapport with his clients.

The narrative is shot through with grim poetry, sonnets of death, rejection and betrayal. Despite not being a devoted Jew, Ben’s upbringing and education make the symbolism of the Hebrew bible very important to him, hence the title of the book. Seraphim is a provocative and potent work of literary fiction, where violence, revenge and cynicism are shared out equally between the battered streets of New Orleans and its courts of justice. Published by Melville House, it is available now.

August 11, 2024 0

FIRE AND BONES . . . Between the covers

To use a cricketing term, the Dr Temperance Brennan book series by Kathy Reichs (left) is 24 not out, and still looking good. The series featuring the forensic anthropologist began with Déjà Dead in 1997. For anyone new to the novels, I’ll just direct you here for background information. Tempe (her preferred nickname) is in her Charlotte NC autopsy room and has just finished one of her trademark investigations into long-dead human remains. She is planning a few days away with her long-time boyfriend, Quebec cop Andrew Ryan, but when she gets home, she has a series of ‘phone calls which persuade her to drive to Washington DC to help with the investigation of a fatal fire in an old house in Foggy Bottom.

The Victorian property had been most recently used as a low rent boarding house, and amid the devastation, there are four dead bodies, all victims of the fire. When part of the ground floor gives way under the weight of one of the fire officers, a hidden cellar full of alcoves and passages is revealed, and it is in one of the chambers that Tempe discovers another corpse tied inside a burlap sack. While the charred remains of the four fire victims are quickly identified, the corpse in the burlap bag is more mysterious. The body is that of a woman, small and slender, but how long she had been in that bag, in that cellar is more problematic. Via one of those nerdish experts who specialise in arcane knowledge, Tempe learns that the sack in which the victim was confined probably dates from the late 1940s.

Tempe, with the help of a TV reporter called Ivy Doyle, learns that the reason for the fire may be connected to a group of hoodlums back in the prohibition era. The Foggy Bottom Gang. The ringleaders were Leo, Emmitt, and Charles “Rags” Warring, who had worked as laborers in their father’s barrel shop. When the (illegal) booze started flowing, all three quickly got caught up in the wild and sometimes violent underworld of Washington, D.C. But what is the connection between events decades ago and modern day Washington DC? Eventually, Tempe finds out the truth, and it reinforces the old adage about revenge being a dish best served cold and, in this case, slow.

The book rattles along at breakneck speed, and Tempe Brennan is her usual sassy, quick-thinking self, a persona that Kathy Reich’s millions of readers have come to know and love over the 27 years since Tempe first appeared. Thy narrative style is unmistakably and uniquely American – slick, witty, and sharp as a tack. It won’t appeal to readers who like gentle cosy crime mysteries set in idyllic British locations, but it is a testament to its style and commercial appeal that a TV series based on the books ran from September 13, 2005, concluding on March 28, 2017, airing for 246 episodes over 12 seasons.

Fire and Bones is gripping and addictively readable, despite the fact that – like books in other long-running American series by writers like Jonathan Kellerman, James Patterson and Harlan Coben – it is formulaic. The formula works, readers love it, so you will hear no complaints from me. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and is out today, 1st August.

August 1, 2024 1

IMPOSTER SYNDROME . . . Between the covers

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.

July 14, 2024 1

CALICO . . . Between the covers

Lee Goldberg baits the hook irresistibly within the first few pages of this novel. Disgraced former LAPD cop Beth McDade has been exiled to the desert wastes of Barstow, on edge of the Mojave Desert. She attends what seems to be a routine road death- pedestrian collides with motor home, only one winner – but the autopsy on the victim is astonishing. He was wearing jeans that hadn’t been made that way since the 1880s. What remains of his dental fillings reveal an amalgam not used in decades. His tobacco tin isn’t just repro. It is original, and contains tobacco not produced commercially since the end of the nineteenth century.

Things become even more baffling when a construction company doing groundwork for a new development unearth an old coffin containing equally old bones. Beth finds her ultra rational mindset severely challenged when the bones are dated to the early 20th century, but contain titanium implants only available to surgeons in more recent times. She then receives a visit from a former LA colleague (and lover) who is on a missing persons case. He is looking for Owen Slader, a very 21st century social media personality and chef,who was last seen filling up his car with gas on the way to visit his daughter.

There are two parallel narratives, one being that of present day Beth McDade, and the other being the views and experiences of Owen Slader. On that February night he was engulfed by what appears to be a lightning storm and, when he recovers his senses, the freeway no longer exists, and he is stranded near the primitive and rumbustious silver mining settlement of Calico. And it is 1882. Slader hides his hired Mercedes in a cave, rigs up a solar battery charger to power his iPhone and, using his 21st century culinary skills, caries out a profitable life for himself cooking up delicacies for the hungry miners of Calico. He meets – and marries another refugee from another time, a woman called Wendy, but she was ‘taken’ by the Time Gods a couple of decades earlier than Slader. This is when the complexities and total unknowables of the time travel concept begin to cause brain hurt, and the obvious questions like the one below, can never be answered:
“If stamps on the titanium implants found in the bones within the ancient coffin identify the recipient as Owen Slader who, identifying as Ben Cartwright (1960s TV Western reference!), died in the early 1900s, how did he then father a daughter in the early decades of the 21st century?”

The author certainly has fun with some of the more bizarre aspects of being a time traveller. He has Ben Cartwright buying copies of new novels by writers like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson knowing that (as first editions) they will become immensely valuable decades ahead. When a cholera epidemic hits Calico, Cartwright, nursing the town judge in what seems to be his final fevered moments, takes out his iPhone and plays the dying man some music. Problem is, the judge doesn’t die, and when he recovers he goes around loudly humming ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow.’

Meanwhile, Beth McDade struggles to reconcile facts that are, at the same time, impossible but also incontrovertible. She even finds, boarded up in a cave, the 2019 rental that Owen Slader was driving when he disappeared. It is, needless to say, improbably decayed and weathered given that it can only have been there a matter of months. Eventually, our heroine tackles – and bests – the FBI and the implacable American military machine.

Lee Goldberg’s audacious plot and premise will not be for everyone, particularly those who think that Hamlet’s famous remark to Horatio was just the rambling of a confused and conflicted young man. Of course, time travel novels are nothing new, and Goldberg does nod in homage to the grand-daddy of the genre, Herbert George Wells, but also develops the ‘stepping on a butterfly’ trope that began with Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’. Key question, though. Does Lee Goldberg’s book work? Of course it does. The writer is also an experienced screenwriter, producer and TV executive, far too well versed in his trade to stretch the credulity of his readers and viewers to beyond breaking point. Calico is immensely entertaining, with a runaway-train narrative drive. Published by Severn House, it came out in hardback and Kindlle in November 2023 and this paperback edition was published on 4th July.

July 9, 2024 1

RESOLUTION . . . Between the covers

Edinburgh copper Ray Lennox last appeared a couple of years ago in The Long Knives. Now, he has quit the force and, given his predilections, is in a strange place on what might be thought foreign soil – England’s south coast, a partner in a security firm based in Horsham, with his customer base ranging from the gay green madness of Brighton, to the villas of Eastbourne, where the silence is only punctuated by the quiet hum of wheelchair tyres and the creak of zimmer frames.

His business partner is George Marsden, in some ways the antithesis of Lennox, in that he is English public school, suave, urbane, and speaks the esoteric language of the English middle classes. He is no man’s dupe, however, as we are given hints that he once served with the Special Boat Service.

Lennox is deeply in lust with a local chemistry lecturer, Carmel Devereux, some years his junior, and it is at a meet and greet party with potential wealthy sponsors of her research, that he is staggered to see the face of Mathew Cardingworth, a character from wounding nightmares. In an Edinburgh underpass, all those years ago, Cardingworth was one of a gang that captured Lennox and his teenage mate Les Brodie, and subjected them to grim sexual and physical abuse.

Fantasising about getting even with Cardingworth, Lennox actually meets him socially and then makes the error of accepting Cardingworth’s offer of a couple of tickets for the executive box at Brighton’s next Premiership home game against Liverpool. An even worse mistake is inviting Les Brodie down from Scotland, standing him the air fare as a treat. Whereas Lennox’s vengeance against his abuser have stayed firmly inside his head, Les Brodie is more volatile. He catches sight of Cardingworth as they drink their pints and graze at the buffet; it only takes seconds for Brodie to recognise his abuser, and he is just as quick to smash his glass on the bar counter and thrust it into Cardingworth’a face.

As his obsession with Cardingworth deepens, Lennox discovers that there is a tenuous – but intriguing link between the businessman and several youngsters who disappeared from the ‘care’ of Sussex Children’s Services. The fact that all local and national newspaper references to those years – print, microfiche and digital – have all disappeared. In another puzzle, at least for the reader, one of the non-Brighton, non-now narratives in the book is in the voice of an Englishman, perhaps a merchant seaman, who has killed a man in a Shanghai bar fight and been incarcerated sine die in a vile Chinese prison. He is clearly a deeply damaged and dangerous man, and he appears to be directing his story at Lennox, but who is he?

Lennox, as he peels back the layers of the recent past, all too late realises he is in way over his head, but with almost suicidal and terrier-like tenacity, he presses on regardless, perhaps echoing the thoughts of his famous fictional countryman, who mused:

“I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

Fans of Welsh will love this, and feel at home with how the story darts back and forth between various characters, the Scottish conversational vernacular, the violence, the sex – and the grim humour. There is one wonderful example of the latter when contractors installing a new security system in a retirement home fall foul of a particularly demented resident, and all hell breaks loose. The titular resolution does not happen until the final pages of the book and it occurs, ironically, in the same care home where the contractors came so comically to grief. The violence is gloriously excessive, and none of it – despite the cover image – involves anything so clean and crisp as a handgun. You can take your pick from acid attacks, being dismembered by a sabre, facial surgery via a beer glass, poisoned wine, inhalation of liquid concrete and being hurled through a a high window. Resolution is published by Jonathan Cape and will be out on 11th July.

July 8, 2024 0

REDEMPTION . . . Between the covers

Young Joshua Moore loved rabbits and hares. He had pestered his mom and dad – Evelyn and Tobias – for a pet, and so they bought him a white rabbit. The family had only just moved from London to San Diego, and the rabbit in its hutch mesmerised the nine year old boy. Reluctantly, because they were only just finding their USA feet, Evelyn and Tobias allowed Joshua to go away on a school camp in the nearby desert. On arriving, Joshua had seen a desert hare and, as darkness fell, it appeared again in the moonlight. Chasing it to get a closer look, and running across the highway, Joshua was struck by a car and killed instantly. The driver of the car didn’t stop.

Evelyn spends the next eleven years brooding over her son’s death, and plotting revenge. We get an early indicator which reveals her mindset:

“I spent a whole month in bed after the funeral, listening to the rabbit we’d bought for him hopping around in its hutch on the other side of the window. The rustling of the sawdust. The chomping and crunching of the vegetables. I lay there for a month loathing it, it’s mere existence feeding my rage until it was a living, breathing thing, for bigger and stronger than me. When I finally got out of bed, the first the thing I did was stride towards that hutch and snap the rabbits neck. It never did get a name.”

Driving the car was Aaron Alexander. a young, gay, drug-addicted drifter. He was traced, tried, and jailed. Now, eleven years later, he is out of prison, and scratching a living as a pump attendant at a gas station in Beatty, Nevada. Evelyn, with Tobias a reluctant passenger, gets in the car and heads for Nevada. Among minimal clothes changes and toiletries in her bag are a handgun, boxes of ammunition, rope, duct tape and a black canvas roll containing every variety of butchers’ knife. The relationship between Evelyn and Tobias has long since soured. She cannot bear his touch, and yet he clings on desperately, hoping she will someday emerge from her frozen state.

At the motel where they rest up for that first night, Evelyn does what she had obviously been planning for ages. While Tobias sleeps, she takes his wallet, cards, phone and shoes, and drives off into the early dawn. The remainder of the book is a hypnotic dance of death that plays out in cockroach infested motels, desolate gas stations miles from anywhere and the endless Nevada desert, where rapidly encroaching wildfires make the air sting. Very simply, Tobias is trying to get to Aaron before Evelyn can kill him, and it becomes a very bloody affair. Fans of dentist torture à la Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man mustn’t miss the scene where Evelyn, driven mad with toothache, removes the offending molar herself, with the help of a hammer, chisel and pair of pliers.

There is an ironic problem with the premise that Tobias’s main aim is to save Evelyn from herself, by stopping her from killing Aaron, because by the time they are grimly reunited,in a desolate former auto repair shop, she has already done enough damage to ensure that – always assuming that she survives – she will be put away for a very long time.

Redemption – noun, the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.

How apposite, then, is the book’s title for the three main characters? Perhaps it is for Aaron and Tobias. For sure, Aaron’s upbringing was tough, but his brother Chris survived, and it was Aaron being open about his sexual preferences which precipitated a slide into self pity and woeful lifestyle choices. By the end of the book, he has come through the firestorm of events with something akin to self-respect and moral courage. Tobias is more complex. He is the Hamlet of the piece, beset by doubt, a reluctance to act decisively and timidity in the face of Evelyn’s white hot anger. But he survives, and no-one comes out the other side of the horrific violence towards the end of the story a weaker person. Evelyn? For me, her ever increasing derangement puts her beyond any sense of redemption, but you must make up your own minds.

There was a term – Grand Guignol – applied, retrospectively, to the blood-stained stage dramas of the Jacobean period and, in the twentieth century there was, in Paris, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which specialised in acting out scenes of horrific violence with spectacular special effects. Redemption certainly has elements of Grand Guignol, but it is a powerful novel which lays bare the dreadful things people will do to each other when they are – physically and emotionally – pushed beyond the limit. Published by Simon and Schuster, it is out today, 20th June.