THE VANISHED

There are some puzzles about Tim Weaver’s new novel, VANISHED, and they’ve struck me just from the outside of the book: one of the blurbs calls him “one of Britain’s most talented psychological suspense writers” while another suggests he will appeal to fans of Mo Hayder. I don’t associate Mo Hayder with psychological suspense.

VANISHED is all about things not being what they seem. Indeed it is about the damage people do to themselves, sometimes while they try to find their true natures, at other times while they are trying to hide their true murderous, raping souls from the world. Some of that damage is psychological, some is physical. Whatever it is, it is gruesome. Whatever it is, the police can barely comprehend, even after they have evidence that lonely people are being kidnapped, and even after they have evidence of at least one mutilated body.

Private investigator David Raker is unaware of the associations he will find as he is hired by Julia Wren to find her City financier husband, Sam, who one morning left home, boarded a tube train, and was never seen to leave it. Sam, though, Raker discovers, was developing another life; he was also becoming some crook’s laundryman, washing his dirty money; two things that became more than an unfortunate coincidence, because they made Sam a risk and a target.

Raker is fortunate in having a few contacts in the Met, and fortunate too that a disgraced detective trying to redeem himself wants to do it through the Wren disappearance. Raker can sense that Colm Healy, that troubled ‘tec, has other things on his mind - redemption is not a fulltime activity - but beggars cannot be choosers.

Is it odd that a thriller in which deviant psychology and subconscious desires should be played out in railway tunnels, tube stations, and cellars? Not necessarily, especially when you realise the significant difference of the attic prisoner to those in the cellar. You’ll have come a long way then, and have met a few wounded bodies, too, while Tim Weaver will have kept you guessing.