A tense tale of disappearance and violent death in Edinburgh, with a red herring or two and a nice emotional edge. Mark is a photographer and while filming beached whales gets a call to say his pregnant wife has not collected their boy, Nathan, from school. Things then get pretty nasty with the sex trafficking trade at the centre of some violent scenes. What makes this a bit different is that the little boy is well written and the dad’s relationship with him convincing and touching, an unusual element in a thriller.
'It's just to say that no-one has come to pick Nathan up from school, and we were wondering if there was a problem of some kind?' As Mark Douglas photographs a pod of whales stranded in the waters off Edinburgh's Portobello Beach, he is called by his son's school: his wife, Lauren, hasn't turned up to collect their son. Calm at first, Mark collects Nathan and takes him home but as the hours slowly crawl by he increasingly starts to worry. With brilliantly controlled reveals, we learn some of the painful secrets of the couple's shared past, not least that it isn't the first time Lauren has disappeared. And as Mark struggles to care for his son and shield him from the truth of what's going on, the police seem dangerously short of leads. That is, until a shocking discovery...
Doug Johnstone is the author of four novels, most recently Hit & Run, acclaimed by Ian Rankin as 'a great slice of noir' and by Irvine Welsh as 'a grisly parable for our times'. He is also a freelance journalist, a songwriter and musician, and has a PhD in nuclear physics. He lives in Edinburgh.
