Keeping you guessing

New Year’s Eve.

A man, his wife and two children are murdered in their gated community home.

A third child, a four-year-old boy, is kidnapped.

The murder weapon is a bolt gun used to stun cattle before they are slaughtered.

An unusual weapon, but not unheard of.

Thirty years previously farm worker Peter Nawkins – nicknamed the Slaughter Man by the Press – had used a similar tool to slay his fiancé’s father and three brothers after the wedding was called off.

He has served his time and is out of prison.

He immediately becomes the prime suspect.

The case falls to DC Max Wolfe, in this, Tony Parsons’ second novel featuring the dogged detective whose raison d’etre is his young daughter, Scout, and their dog, Stan.

Ensuring that the police do not file away this kidnap investigation as a lost cause requiring only perfunctory attention, are the missing boys very wealthy uncle and aunt who call out the police brass to intervene and give impromptu press conferences often to keep the matter on the front pages.

Max braves an angry gypsy encampment to interview Nawkins and initially dismisses him as innocent but he changes his mind and he and the team revisit the encampment and discover hundreds of pictures of the murdered woman taped to the ceiling of Nawkins’ room.

Convinced this is more than infatuation on Nawkes’s part, Max tries to arrest him but he escapes in the melee when the investigators are viciously attacked and some of them, including Max, hospitalised.

The chase is on but a series of plot twists and red herrings contrive to have the reader second guessing the police.

And, ultimately, Max starts second guessing himself.

Despite, like so many English crime novels seeming to lack the robust action so favoured by their American counterparts, it is a first-rate thriller that will have you unsure of whom the killer is until the very end.

But isn’t that what a good whodunit is supposed to do?