YOU'RE NEXT

California in the 1980’s, a man on the run dumps his son at a playground and disappears. Flash forward almost thirty years and Mike Wingate has a family and is on the verge of making it big as a property developer, the mystery of his past is about, thanks to a seemingly chance encounter,  to come back to life. When it does he will have to rediscover a side of himself he thought had been long buried in order to save his family.

It’s a little early in the year for me to be handing out awards, but You’re Next has to be in the running it be one of the best thrillers I’ve read in 2011. Gregg Hurwitz has created a plot that turns on an original way of evading US gambling laws powerful enough to tempt the greedy to do the most awful things in order to keep hold of their ill gotten gains.

The action comes thick and fast with Wingate and Shep, a friend from the past he thought he had escaped, battling to evade the bad guys and the authorities, the power of payola complicating matters by  making it hard to tell where the demarcation line between the two lies. Hurwitz writes well about the emotional cost of not knowing your true origins, the power of friendships forged during childhood and the lengths people will go to in order to protect what they feel is theirs by right.

This is a genuinely gripping book that ticks all the right boxes to be a big hit whilst at the same time being unafraid to deal with the emotional fallout of the events it describes.