Jim Newton is a former TV employee who has also worked in the film industry. Drawing on a professional background in broadcasting and film, he reviews fiction with a particular eye for storytelling, character, pace and atmosphere.
The best psychological thrillers do not begin by asking who committed the crime. They ask what an otherwise decent person might do once the unthinkable has happened.
The novel wastes no time putting that question to the test. Criminal lawyer Jack is driving his pregnant wife Rachel to hospital along a dark Worcestershire country lane. She is just 23 weeks pregnant and apparently going into premature labour. Distracted by her distress, Jack hears the sickening impact of his car striking something. He stops and discovers a child's mangled bicycle and a bloodied body.
The child appears beyond saving. Rachel and their desperately wanted unborn baby may not be. Jack makes the decision upon which the entire novel turns: he moves the body from the road, tells Rachel they hit a deer and drives on to hospital.
It is a terrific opening because Hatton immediately gives his protagonist a choice for which there is no comfortable answer.
Things become considerably worse when another vehicle arrives at the scene. Its driver, Callum Prosser, is found injured beside his wrecked van and the evidence initially appears to place responsibility for the child's death squarely upon him. Empty beer cans inside the vehicle hardly help his cause.
Investigating is DCI Clara Higgins, an experienced detective who quickly senses that the physical evidence doesn't quite add up. Blood trails travel in contradictory directions; the body appears to have been moved; what looks initially like a tragic road accident begins to acquire increasingly troubling dimensions.
Hatton's smartest decision, however, is to make Jack a criminal defence lawyer. When he encounters Callum, he knows something nobody else does: whatever else Callum may have done, Jack believes the man is innocent of the original collision. Yet confessing could subject Rachel to precisely the stress doctors have warned might endanger their baby. So Jack devises an extraordinary compromise. He will represent Callum, keep him out of prison and delay matters until the pregnancy is safer … then confess. He understands perfectly well that in doing so he risks perverting the course of justice.
It is a wonderfully uncomfortable premise.
Hatton repeatedly forces the reader to reconsider where sympathy should lie. Jack's behaviour is indefensible in legal terms, but emotionally understandable. Every fresh deception is presented as temporary, necessary and undertaken for his family. The problem with lies, of course, is that they demand further lies.
Running alongside Jack's story is that of Harry, the widowed father struggling with a failing farm and raising his children after his wife's death. His grief gives the novel another emotional centre, while Clara provides its procedural backbone. Hatton moves between viewpoints in short chapters, steadily tightening the connections between characters who initially seem to occupy separate stories.
This structure makes Truth Will Out extremely difficult to put down. There is always another revelation just beyond the chapter break, although the technique occasionally works against the novel: at more than 90 chapters, the relentless switching of viewpoint can sometimes feel engineered primarily to manufacture cliffhangers.
It would be unfair to reveal the later twists, except to say that Hatton does not leave the reader with the simple version of events established in those opening pages. The forensic inconsistencies matter. So does Callum's family, particularly his violent brother Neil. By the final act, what appeared to be a hit-and-run thriller has developed into something considerably more tangled and dangerous.
Truth Will Out is Hatton's debut novel. It is an assured one: part police procedural, part domestic thriller and part moral dilemma. Its real question is contained in the title. Truth may eventually come out, but Hatton is much more interested in what happens while people are desperately trying to keep it buried.
My Verdict: A gripping and cleverly constructed debut thriller that turns one terrible night into an increasingly intricate web of guilt, deception and divided loyalties. The twists provide the thrills, but it is the impossible choices that linger.
