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.
Coming of age in a small West Yorkshire town is tough enough for Adrian Brown as he negotiates the complications of work and family life. The last thing he needs is to be dragged back into the past he thought he had escaped as the last person to be abducted by the Lollipop Man, and the only victim to survive the experience.
When a young girl goes missing Adrian, an intern at the local newspaper, is drawn into the investigation. Haunted by the memory of what happened six years previously he must try to unravel the identity of the Lollipop Man before he kills again.
This is an intelligent thriller in which Daniel Sellers pulls off, along with much else besides, the far from easy trick of writing convincingly about the recent past. The 1990’s are portrayed from the standpoint of a part of Britannia that is far from cool. A place of shabby pubs and streets that are almost as narrow as the minds of many of the people living there.
The author also writes well about the long shadow the crimes of the Moors Murders and the Yorkshire Ripper cast over the North. One that is made all the darker by how the police and the media allowed lazy assumptions to cloud their judgement, possibly prolonging the agony for the communities impacted.
In Adrian Brown, Sellers has created a central character struggling to break out of the constraints of prejudice and his past. Both things are described with unflinching honesty, suggesting that a decade that prided itself on being forward looking, was less progressive than those of us who remember it would like to think.
The thriller aspect of the book is brilliantly paced with a slow drip of unease building towards a nail-biting conclusion. If The Lollipop Man hasn’t been optioned by television yet, then it deserves to be, it is crying out to be made into a superior quality series.
Until that happy day anyone reading this book can enjoy both a first-rate thriller, and the smug feeling of having been in on something special from the start.
