Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Matthew Prior, a seemingly blameless office worker is brutally murdered. Before dying he sends a cryptic message to his estranged wife. Not content to leave things to the police, Sara starts an investigation of her own. This brings her into contact with Liverpool’s underworld where violence is the common currency.
Kept at arms-length from the official investigation by the fifth-floor - DS Nathan Cody discovers a link to a past-case and comes face-to-face with an old adversary. An enigmatic figure in a clown mask who tempts him to take action, one that will answer the questions haunting him, but could destroy his career.
Jackson takes his characters and his readers, into the darkest places of their own nature. Presenting them with choices that could resolve their problems, but at a heavy cost. The resulting novel is a ball of pure tension wound tighter than the insides of a golf-ball.
He creates unsettling little mind games that are rooted in a brilliant twisting of a well-known philosophical conundrum. What would you do, rapidly turns into what wouldn’t you do? The answer turns out to be, if pushed far enough, almost anything.
This is an at times genuinely unsettling addition to a series that achieves its effect[s] by making readers think about the things that make them most uncomfortable, unsettled. Although the idea of what dreams might come as a result makes you shudder, it is hard not to be fascinated where David Jackson’s next dark night of the soul will take his readers.
