Sweet William

by Iain Maitland

Life and death played out over 48 hours. A father desperate to be with his young son escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital, knowing he has just one chance for the two of them to start a new life together. His goal is to snatch the three-year-old – a diabetic who needs insulin to stay alive – and run away to France ... but first he must find the boy, evade his foster family and stay well clear of the police, already in pursuit. A real page-turner cut through with dark humour, Sweet William zeroes in on a potent mental illness, a foster family under pressure, and an aggrieved father separated from his precious child. The result is an incisive and deeply affecting literary thriller.

Genres: Thriller, Crime

220 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 16, 2017

About the author

Iain Maitland has been a professional writer since 1987. He has written over 50 books, mainly on business, and been published as far away as Russia, India, Japan, USA and Australia. He has also written for the Sunday Times, Which? and the Financial Times amongst many others.

Reviews

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5 stars*

A man called Orrey escapes from an institution for the criminally insane, killing a guard so casually it’s only afterwards when he mentions leaving his dressing gown cord behind that you realize how it was used.
This incidental killer has one objective - to “rescue” his three-year-old son and escape with him to a fantasy life in the south of France.  Little William was taken into the care of his aunt and her husband after Orrey killed his wife.  Currently the foster family are spending time with the grandparents at their cottage in Aldeburgh.

William is a diabetic and has a couple of missed injections, but that is too long.  Orrey succeeds in grabbing him during the confusion of a local fair. He eludes the police and the distraught family, hoodlums and louts who mistake him for a pervert, he is hunted through the alleys and suburbs of the seaside town, leaving mayhem and death behind in his increasingly frantic flight, unaware of the reason for his boy’s deteriorating condition.

Scenes alternate between members of the adoptive family and the father, Orrey addressing the reader in the first person with a sickening chumminess, going into minute detail of his behaviour except in one particular. In the matter of the murders he is so hazy as to imply they didn’t really happen, meanwhile assuring us that whatever did happen was justifiable in order to save William.

There is a reasonable plot in Sweet William which I enjoyed, though I think it could have worked better as a short story. Orrey comes over, not as a sad sick man or a stricken father, but as a con artist in love with his wordy self.

[Susan Hampson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think my heart broke a little more with each chapter that I read about William. William is only 3 years old and already his mummy has been murdered and his daddy is in a secure mental institution. Now William is being cared for by his adoptive parents, his mum’s sister and her husband and he is very excited because they are going to Granny’s and Grandpa’s at Aldeburgh to celebrate Halloween at the Fair. His mummy and daddy sometimes hurt him but at 3 he doesn’t understand that the needles they use on him and not being allowed nice things to eat are because he is a type 1 diabetic.
Raymond Orrey is determined to escape and reclaim his son. He knows the family traditions of how they celebrate Halloween, this year he will be making it one that they will never forget. He is one hell of a cunning and crazy guy that has played the system and people who call all the shots until he has been moved into a more lax ‘secure’ unit. One that he is going to escape from.
What an edgy and ultimately terrifying read. When I opened this book I moved into the mind of Raymond and boy is this bloke needed locking up. Raymond has one goal to take his son back and make a new life for them and no one will stop him. The story is violent but seen through Raymond’s eyes Iain Maitland pulls off and captures the whole thing through Raymond’s flippant reasoning. It makes petrifying reading.
Raymond is so focused that he can only see the end game not what is right under his nose. William I just wanted to pick up and hug. This is innocence at its purest, being in his mind too and hearing his reasoning to the situation he was in and how he felt. A little boy who never lost hope. It all becomes a race against time before more lives are lost and tragedy occurs.
This is an edge of your seat, nail-biting read that will haunt you way after you finish reading.
 

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sweet William terrified me. This is not a horror story, it is classed as a crime thriller, yet the horrors of the human brain are all very real within this troubling tale. It's a book that has lingered in my mind, a book that has astounded me and although the subject matter is dark and savage, it is a book that satisfied my reading needs.

The story begins as Raymond Orrey escapes from a secure psychiatric unit, somewhere in Nottinghamshire. Told in Raymond's own voice, it is clear that he is a clever, if very dangerous character and the reader is not quite sure if his narrative is reliable.

Raymond's aim is to snatch his small son William; the love of his life, his legacy, his boy. William is living with Raymond's dead wife's sister and her partner. Although it is hinted at, the reader isn't sure what happened to the wife, or why Raymond has been locked up when the story starts, although the grisly truth becomes clear as the story unfolds.

William is diabetic and requires regular injections of insulin to stay alive. The chapters of the story alternate between Raymond's voice and the thoughts of young William. The child struggles to understand why his Mama and Papa continue to hold him down and hurt him with needles; why they won't let him have the sweets that he craves. The world is a strange place through William's eyes.

It is Raymond however, whose voice is loudest. This author has expertly captured the thought processes, the lack of understanding and empathy and the destructive nature of the psychopath. Raymond's thoughts and his actions are chilling. His justification for the things that he does in order to be with is son are cold, calculating and very frightening.




Sweet William is a tense story, it's the sort of book that makes you hold your breath as you turn each page, as you wonder just what will happen next, and will Raymond ever reach his goal.

It is clear that Iain Maitland knows his settings very well. The sense of place is astounding, be it the dark lanes and swirling Trent of Nottinghamshire or the seaside resort of Aldeburgh.

Sweet William is dark and chilling. Raymond Orrey is a menacing character, with no redeeming features, yet he is intense and intricate and shockingly realistic. Having worked in a secure psychiatric setting for ten years, I certainly recognised his traits

Gripping and immersive; Sweet William is an intelligently written thriller that deals with the intricacies of the human brain, mixed up with the emotional ties of the family.
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[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whom the gods would destroy...

A man escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital to find his little son, sweet William, and run off to a new life, just the two of them, in the south of France. This is the story of the next forty-eight hours...

And what a story! A complete roller-coaster during most of which we're stuck inside the head of Orrey, the father, whose frequent assertions that he's not mad somehow fail to convince us! Dark and disturbing doesn't even begin to describe it. By all rights, I should have hated it – I've bored on often enough about my dislike of using children to up the tension in crime fiction. But it's a tour de force piece of writing with one of the most brilliantly drawn disturbed central characters I've read in a long time – think Mr Heming (A Pleasure and a Calling) or The Dinner or Zoran Drvenkar (You). Then add in relentless pacing that drives the book forward at a speed to leave you gasping – the definitive page-turner!

I don't want to say too much about the plot since it's always best to know as little as possible in advance when reading thrillers, but I will mention that little William, who's only three, goes through a lot, so if you really struggle with bad things happening to fictional children this may not be for you. There is no sexual abuse however.

The book is written in two voices. One is a third-person, past tense narrator who tells us the events of this forty-eight hours as they happen to William's new family, who adopted him after his mum died and his father was put in the hospital. Although we do learn the names of these characters, for the most part the narrator refers to them as 'the young woman', 'the old man', etc. This is a fantastic device for keeping us distanced from them – in fact, they're not even particularly likeable in the beginning – so that somehow we're not sucked in to being 100% on their side – not for a while, anyway.

I can see her, evil cow, trying to keep up with Veitch. She's holding William's hand and every time he stumbles, because she's going way too fast for his little legs, she pulls him to his feet and keeps walking.
Poor little mite.
I'd like to push on up behind her and jostle her to the ground next time she does that and then, as she stumbles and falls, I'd take little William by the hand and be away into the crowd.
He'd look up at me in surprise and I'd look down at him and smile and say something sweet and kind and he'd smile back as we disappeared away together forever.
You know what, I might even kiss him on the forehead. That's what you do, that is.
Kiss little children.

Orrey however tells us his own story in the present tense, talking directly to us (or maybe talking to another voice inside his head, but the effect is the same). He doesn't have much of a plan and has to react to each event as it happens. Frequently, a chapter will end with him summing up what he thinks his options are and then asking what would you do? Now, it's perfectly possible I'm a very sick person because I found myself being forced to agree that sometimes the most extreme option was really the only possible one. When I discovered that at one point I was agreeing that he really had to do something that no normal person would ever dream of doing, I laughed at how brilliantly the author had pushed me so far inside Orrey's insane world view that he'd made it seem almost logical.

Despite the darkness of the story, Maitland keeps the graphic stuff firmly off the page for the most part, though that doesn't stop it from seeping into the reader's imagination. But it does make it a bearable – dare I say, even an entertaining – read, which wouldn't have been the case for me had every event been described in glorious technicolor. The oblique references to what has happened during the gaps in Orrey's narration actually frequently made me laugh in a guilty kind of way – there's a thin vein of coal black humour buried very insidiously in there, I think, in the early parts, at least. Although the stuff relating to William is difficult to read, if Orrey has a redeeming feature it's that he truly does love his son, which somehow made it possible for me to remain in his company if not on his side.

However, as the book goes on, the darkness becomes ever deeper and Maitland changes the focus with a great deal of subtlety and skill so that gradually our sympathies become fixed where they should have been all along – with William and his adopted parents. But we are left inside Orrey's unreliable mind right up to the end, so that the book might end but our stress levels take a good deal longer to get back to normal. I finished it four days ago, and I'm still waiting...

I believe this is Maitland's fictional début – well, I'm kinda speechless at that. While the subject matter might make this a tough read for some, for me the quality of the writing, the way the author nudges and pushes the reader to go exactly where he wants, and the utterly believable and unique voice of Orrey, all make this a stunning achievement. Set aside a few hours to read it in a block though – you'll either stop for good very quickly or you won't want to stop at all...

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Saraband.

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[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to be honest and say that I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy this book, that it might be a bit too dark for me. Well, I don't know that I can say I enjoyed it, but my goodness I could not put it down!

The central character and main narrator of the story is Raymond Orrey, a man convicted of the murder of his wife and being detained under the mental health act at a secure hospital. Except that it isn't very secure as Orrey escapes from the hospital at the beginning of the novel and heads off to take his young son William from his adoptive parents, Orrey's wife's sister and husband. He knows that the family always go the Halloween Fair at Aldeburgh and sees the crowded area as the perfect opportunity to be able to snatch the little boy and make his escape through the crowds.

The author takes us right inside Orrey's head and that is a very unpleasant, unsettling place to be. There is nothing likeable about this character at all and I read with dread of what he would do next. Clearly the man is mentally ill, as evidenced by his incarceration in the secure hospital, but he also appears very clever, is absolutely focussed on being with his son and building up a relationship with him. Nothing is going to stand in his way and that includes various people he meets as he tries to keep out of the reach of the police. He justifies and almost ignores what he does in his quest to get William away from his adoptive family. It was distressing to read about William's experience, especially in the chapters told from his point of view. William has type-1 diabetes and gets more and more ill throughout his ordeal as his father doesn't know about his condition and thinks he is just tired. 

Told over the course of 48 hours and in very short chapters, this book is the very definition of a page turner. It may be a bleak read as we follow the deranged Orrey but it is most definitely a compulsive read. The author takes his reader on a fast-paced journey with a real sense of urgency right to the last pages. It is perhaps a bit of an inconclusive ending but that worked well here, leaving the reader to make up their own mind how they think the story resolves.

[Tripfiction · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark thriller set in Aldeburgh



Raymond Orrey, having murdered his wife and goodness knows what else beside (the details are deliberately sketchy), is detained under Section 37 in a secure mental institution. At the start of the novel he sets about proving how insecure the institution actually is by escaping. He is bent on finding and kidnapping his small son, William, who has been adopted by his mother’s sister and her husband and is settling into a decent family life, despite the miseries of being a type one diabetic, with the endless finger pricking, injections and dietary restrictions that are involved. William’s little family take him to stay with his grandparents at Aldeburgh for the Halloween festival. Orrey knows that the family always spend Halloween at Aldeburgh and the crowds attending the festival, he thinks, will give him the opportunity to snatch the child. So he makes his troubled way there, neatly disposing of anyone who threatens to impede his progress.

The eponymous William may well be sweet, but this story certainly isn’t – it’s at times quite nasty. This book has been described as a dark thriller and it is, without doubt, a page turner – you want to keep reading in the increasingly vain hope that all will turn out well in the end. And dark it certainly is – but without any light to offset the gloom. There are no characters to really identify with, nothing to lift the mood of despair. Most thrillers work because the reader identifies with the potential victim and hopes desperately that they will escape the horror pursuing them. Here, the story is narrated by Orrey as he flees with the small child from the police and it is extremely difficult to find anything in Orrey to empathise with. Only at the beginning when Orrey was describing his fantastical plans to form a daddy-child bond with William by taking him to the south of France, did I feel the slightest twinge of feeling for the character but that was all too soon obliterated by his repeated aggressive commands direct to the reader. All the other characters with whom you might possibly identify are too one dimensional to be effective. Even the plot doesn’t offer much in the way of the exciting twists usual in thrillers, as Orrey just seems to blunder interminably around the back streets of Aldeburgh with his obviously very ill child.

Iain Maitland clearly knows Aldeburgh well and the beach, the seafront and the narrow streets that lead down to the seafront are clearly described. The reader sees these places through Orrey’s jaundiced eyes. Maitland describes Orrey as an unreliable narrator and it is clear, from the onset, that Orrey’s view of the world is certainly pretty different from anyone else’s. As I reached the end of the book (and an unsatisfying ending to my mind) all I could feel was a sense of relief. It just wasn’t a book for me.

[Linda Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t you just love it when a book is so good you have to put your whole life on hold until you’ve devoured every word? That’s exactly what Sweet William is like.

From the very first word of Sweet William I was hooked. The writing is fantastic. Partly it’s the superbly created voice of the narrator so that I was inside his dubious head with him. Partly it’s the overall quality of the writing with the rhetorical questions and the stunning sentence structure that has maximum impact on the reader. And partly it’s the breathtaking pace of the plot over 48 hours that left me reeling. I genuinely felt tense the whole time I was reading but, although I had to pause to let my pulse slow back down, I couldn’t tear myself away. Several times I found I wasn’t actually breathing! Sweet William is a book that clamours to be read at breakneck speed.

The first person viewpoint is very disturbing. It’s not always clear to whom the narrator is speaking – the reader, a voice in his head, or perhaps someone beyond the end of the novel in the same way he has had therapy in the past. What I found both compelling and appalling was that the way in which he justified his actions, which are clearly insane, was only a short step away from the way in which we ‘normal’ people justify our own actions too. I don’t know whether the concept of the way we treat those with psychiatric health issues and the exploration of how they think and behave was a deliberate treatise by Iain Maitland or simply a device upon which to construct the plot but either way I found Sweet William stunning and thought provoking. Similarly, not knowing the name of the narrator until well into the second half of the novel adds to that feeling of society rejecting and erasing those with his kind of problems.

I can’t say too much about the plot or the settings as they are so closely linked and I don’t want to spoil the read but I will say that when Stamford, a location just a few miles from where I live, was mentioned I actually felt quite nervous and threatened.

I felt the concept of ‘what if’ was brilliantly handled, making my brain reel with possibilities. What if it were my child? What if I felt responsible? What if my mental health broke down? There are also several unanswered questions in Sweet William that make the book so very disturbing so that it keeps nagging away in my mind. Sweet William is a book I won’t forget in a hurry. In my view it is outstanding.
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[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel is the tale of two days in which Raymond snatches his son in a bid to start a new life together but very quickly you work out that Raymond is perhaps not cut out to be father material after all. Initially, I looked at this book and thought that I'd be rooting for Raymond, a father denied his son due to his mental illness but it soon becomes clear that Raymond is not a very nice man at all; not the sort of daddy you would want for a sweet little boy like William.

Raymond Orrey tells his part of the story in the first person and as a reader, this is chilling, when he asks a question I was never quite sure if he was talking to me, or to an alternative personality that was vying for his attention. It was a chilling insight into the mind of a psychopath; in fact it was more than an insight, I was forced to crawl right inside the head of this man and hear his voice and watch his acts and unable to stop him; never gratuitously violent but was left with no doubt that Raymond Orrey was a very violent and unpredictable man. He tries hard to convince us that he is a good man, a good daddy but the chilling narrative makes it clear that he's not

As a reader, I felt as though I had become the unwitting observer to his spiral further into madness, once I started reading, I had engaged with him and there was no escape.We don't really get to know the other characters and it is hard to engage with them because of this. However I don't think the author intended for us to engage with them, they are on the periphery and our focus is on Orrey and William. My heart was in my mouth the whole way through; tears and frustration, sadness and anger were emotions swirling about as I read. This book will crawl under your skin and wrap it's insidious tendrils around you never letting go, once you open this book, there is no going back!

[Cleopatra Pullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raymond Orrey has a plan. He is going to escape from the psychiatric unit, his current home to find his son William and take him away to the South of France to live a blissful life. Orrey is not mad, not like his fellow guests at the Nottinghamshire hospital, he doesn’t dribble or rock himself, he’s planned his escape, as well as he possibly can and he knows where he needs to get to. To the house in Aldeburgh where his son William is visiting with his ‘new’ parents, to attend the parade for Halloween and maybe to have a ride at the funfair. Raymond is going to take William away to a better life, with him, his father.

William is really quite small but he’s had a hell of a disrupted life in that short time and although the short break in the holiday home isn’t friction free – after all, families all have their tensions especially when more than one generation gathers at a time and his ‘grandparents’ are part of the treat. William is also diabetic and not a fan of having his blood tested for sugars.

What follows is mad. Not a politically correct word I’ll admit but the most suitable one. Reading Sweet William is a bizarre experience. Raymond Orrey gives us a blow by blow account of his escape and his thoughts. We are drawn into his world when he seems to ask advice when his plans go awry. Seeing as he didn’t really have any beyond escaping and travelling to his son, this happens frequently. Should this man run or try to blend in with the crowd? Would the police be looking for him or does he have time before they are alerted? We have the questions and then see what he chose in the next chapter – this goes on for 48 hours and is exhausting. Why? Because it pulled this reader entirely into a world where it is hard to keep reminding yourself that Raymond is mad, most likely very dangerous and it doesn’t matter how many times he tries to convince you otherwise.

Of course we are never convinced by those who need to repeatedly tell us they aren’t mad but this author has written this so well that sometimes despite this, you get drawn into Raymond Orrey’s chaotic world so that when he weighs up his options you find yourself predicting which, if any, will be the most successful whilst keeping in mind the careful care needed to keep William safe and well, care I wasn’t sure his father would manage.

This is an unusual piece of crime fiction, the skill of the writer is abundantly apparent even if the title is entirely misleading, this is the darkest read I’ve unexpectedly fallen into in a long, long time! That said I can’t wait to see what this author produces next.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is bit of a different book. I must admit it might not have been a book I’d have clicked on if I’d have seen it on Amazon based on the cover. Saying that, the blurb definitely piqued my interest. How far a father would go to be with his son!

The narrative switches between first person for our main character and then the third person for all the other characters. Frequently where a story has different perspectives, it’s all written in the third person. But with Sweet William, it worked well having the father, Rick, written in the first person. It added to his paranoia and as you read more, his unreliability as a narrator.

Despite being set over 48 hours, I didn’t find there to be the level of pace I’d expect for something based over such a short period of time. However, this didn’t dispel my enjoyment of this book. It’s a slow burner packed with tension and suspense.

I got the impression from the author’s acknowledgements, this story is based or inspired by real life. I would be interested in knowing more about the inspiration to this book.

Many thanks to Diana Morgan at Ruth Killick Publicity for my copy of Sweet William

[Jaffareadstoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those difficult books to review without exposing anything of the story, as to give even the smallest hint of what's happening would be to spoil, what is, a very compelling and, it must said, decidedly dark thriller.

Being caught up in the life of this desperate father, who wants to spend time with his adored son, should on the surface work out well, however, the father in Sweet William isn't anything like your typical father. To say that he has been confined in a secure psychiatric unit for committing heinous crimes is enough to set your teeth on edge from the very start of the story, the opening of which, makes for compelling reading.

Sweet William moves along quickly in real time and the way in which this unique forty-eight hour time lapse evolves allows the story to have a scarily realistic edge. There is much to be aware of, both in terms of the capriciousness of a supremely flawed individual, and also, far beyond this unpredictability there are elements of the story which terrified me, not in a 'being afraid of the dark' sort of fearfulness, more in an escalating feeling of apprehension, which made me very uncomfortable, both in terms of the eventual outcome, and ultimately, for the safety of young, William.

Sweet William is a taut and tense psychological thriller. The author commands the narrative well and keeps the momentum from start to finish. The roller coaster of a journey he takes us on is highlighted by the vividly descriptive way he brings to life the difficulty and emotional impact of a family, and an individual, in absolute turmoil.

[Elaine Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sweet

I found this book absolutely brilliant.I listen on my kindle due to bad eye sight I really felt as if Raymond was talking to me.The book was really engaging and I felt for both the dad and the boy.This book was the second book I. have read by you Iain it won't be my last thank you

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess it is a 3.5 but it got marked down because although it is well-written, it is pretty horrible to read particularly the parts in the first person. There is something more grotesque about reading about murder in the first person, as if you are the one committing the crimes.

[Alix Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet William is an absolutely electrifying read that gripped me from start to finish. Right from the beginning I was tantalised by Maitland's writing and the too-close-for-comfort narrative perspective that made me feel like I was complicit in Rick's crimes. The narrative perspective was definitely one of my favourite parts of the book. It kept me on tenterhooks throughout the entire novel and I was always hesitant to turn the page in case something dreadful happened...

The characters were all carefully crafted to fit the novel and I loved how the narrative switched from first person to third person, so we could get a bit of an insight not only into Rick's mind, but the other family members, to make the situation seem a lot more urgent to the reader.

Overall I loved everything about this book. The plot was so well thought out and the suspense that Maitland created is remarkable. I didn't know what to expect from this book (I haven't read anything like it before) but I really enjoyed it and I definitely need something light and fluffy to read now!