Simon Beckett, the author of the wonderful David Hunter series, has begun a new series, it features police officer, DS Jonah Colley, of the London Met's firearms unit, SCO19. He is a man burdened by the grief and sorrow of losing his 4 year old son, Theo, 10 years ago after he fell asleep in the park. It was assumed that his son wandered away and drowned. This led to his strained marriage to Chrissie to break down, and an estrangement from his long time best friend, DS Gavin Mackinney. In the present, Jonah is drinking with colleagues from his unit at night when he gets a call out of the blue from Gavin, sounding desperate and afraid, asking for his help at Slaughterhouse Quay. Against his better judgement, he decides to go, he just cannot ignore his former friend's pleas for help.
However, he finds himself facing a nightmare, he finds the dead body of Gavin in a warehouse, along with others wrapped in plastic, including a dying woman, Nadine. Jonah himself is attacked so badly, his skull is fractured and his knees so badly damaged, that he has to walk on crutches. As the sole survivor of a night of horror, he is viewed with suspicion by DI Jack Fletcher and DS Bennet, who interview and reinterview him, looking for holes in his account of what happened that night. They are not the only ones interested in him, the lack of information from the police has the media hunting for an exclusive, and one of them, tabloid reporter Corinne Daly, inveigles her way into his hospital room, with Jonah mistaking her for a therapist. The past haunts the present when evidence that relates to a suspect that was cleared in the disappearance of his son has Jonah in deadly danger as he investigates and tries to get to the truth of what happened at Slaughterhouse Quay.
Beckett writes a brutally violent and twisted crime read, with a number of misdirections, and packed with suspense and tension. The central protagonist, Jonah makes for a sympathetic character that you root for, living under the weight of his unbearable loss, and willing to do whatever it takes to find out what happened to Theo, even if it results in his death. He lives in a flat in a tower block, where not all the residents are friendly, the threats he faces there finally push him to reconsider his living arrangements as the novel ends. This was a tense, dark and compulsive read that I think will appeal to many crime and mystery readers, I will definitely be reading the next in the series to see where Beckett takes Jonah next. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.