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.
Former actor Matt arrives home to find the body of a murdered woman lying in his bed; that is just the start of his troubles. A sadistic and manipulative stranger has kidnapped his partner and is threatening to kill her too unless Matt follows his instructions. This is the start of a journey into murder and mayhem that will turn his life upside down and could land him in prison.
This book owes a huge debt to classic film noir in its use of flashbacks, a MacGuffin his characters are willing to kill - to compromise long-held secrets. All the characters are forced to make impossible choices that can only lead them to disaster. Kernick manipulates these conventions with masterly skill, constructing a plot that hurtles through forty-eight fateful hours in his character’s lives. Multiple narrators help to create an atmosphere of swirling paranoia where nobody is who they seemed to be at the start of this thriller. The reader is fed just-enough information to keep him (or her) on the wrong foot as every motive appears to have an ulterior one.
This is all tied up with a switch round at the end, complete with the author’s trademark of a ‘skewed morality’.
Simon Kernick has delivered a taut and intelligent thriller that shows his skills honed into a titanium-edged literary weapon - after many page-turning and violent thrillers.
