Book review
Written by Gary McMahon
Angry Robot paperback
Release date Out now

Thomas Usher sees dead people – the bigger problem is that worse things can see him...

Part private detective story, part very creepy Northern ghost story, Gary McMahon's first novel featuring Thomas Usher is a powerful, gripping tale, even when you start to lose patience with its protagonist.

It's highly reminiscent of John Connolly's Charlie Parker series of novels in places, with both featuring a haunted central figure whose wife and child are beyond his reach. But whereas Connolly delves into the blackness of the human heart, McMahon's is a more visceral approach.

Usher himself is weighed down by guilt but knows that he needs some form of redemption. His almost suicidal desires to help, as well as his modern-day equivalent of self-flagellation (he tattoos a list of those he deems he has failed onto his back), are a warped reflection of that.

There's an unremitting bleakness about the story, from its opening car crash to the truth about the kidnapping that's central to the case, and its setting in a very familiar landscape means that the darkness that's eventually revealed is all the more horrific for its domestic location. Paul Simpson

VERDICT: 8/10
A story that sticks in the mind long after reading.