#BlogTour ‘The Lost’ by Simon Beckett

About the book…

A MISSING CHILD

Ten years ago, the disappearance of firearms police officer Jonah Colley’s young son almost destroyed him.

A GRUESOME DISCOVERY

A plea for help from an old friend leads Jonah to Slaughter Quay, and the discovery of four bodies. Brutally attacked and left for dead, he is the only survivor.

A SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH

Under suspicion himself, he uncovers a network of secrets and lies about the people he thought he knew – forcing him to question what really happened all those years ago…

My thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for the blog tour invite, and publishers Orion books for my gifted e-arc of ‘The Lost’ by Simon Beckett which is published in e-book and hardcover from November 26th.

My word! This novel puts the reader right into the firing line from the very start, plunging you into an investigtion that has its roots in a 10 year old disappearance.

Jonah’s old colleague, and best friend in the Met, sends him a cryptic message, asking him to meet in a warehouse on Slaughter Quay, saying that he had ‘got it all wrong‘…

Arriving to find a grim , and literal, slaughter house, before Jonah can make any sense of what is going on, he is brutally attacked and left for dead.

When he comes around, with his best friend dead-and the body missing-he appears to all intents and purposes, the only one who can explain what is happening to a detective who is like a Rottweiler in human form. Determined not to let Jonah go so easily, he is on the attack right from the start, drawing conclusions from the flimsiest of threads. Broken and physically incapacitated, how can Jonah even begin to pull apart the threads of an case which goes back to the worst day of his life?

Ten years earlier, his young son disappeared from a park, it is a simple enough thing that many, many exhausted parents would have done, even if they wouldn’t necessarily have admitted to, closing their eyes for a brief minute only to open them again and finding the bottom has fallen out of his world.

The assumption that Theo has died in a tragic accident is the final reckoning for Jonah’s marriage, and although he has never completely been able to move on, the impression you get is that this is a man living half a life-everything stopped the day Theo vanished. And now, with Gavin re-appearing, Jonah is pulled back to the one suspect from the park-a career criminal spotted on a bench in the park. Whose pictures just so happen to be on Gav’s computer. Whose blood is found at Slaughter Quay.

Just how much worse can Jonah’s life get?

Oh trust me, it is about to get a whole heap worse…

The adrenaline and sheer energy of this driving plot puts the reader front and centre, riding shotgun with Jonah who knows as much as we do. It gives you a ringside seat to a deep dive into the darkest reaches of what human do to each other in the name of money, the way that the police functions as its own insular hierarchy. The ones keeping the populace safe from injustice can sometimes be the worst criminals and liars of all.

In Jonah you have a flawed, damaged protagonist with one foot in, and one out of the Met, able to see both sides of the story. Where does his loyalty lie?

This is the kind of novel which tears into the worst of crimes-a disappearing child, human trafficking, corruption and conspiracy theories. The line between right and wrong has never been so thinly drawn.

I absolutely devoured this book, my first by Simon Beckett, and I really cannot wait to see where this series goes next.

About the author…

After an MA in English, Simon Beckett spent several years as a property repairer before a stint teaching in Spain. Back in the UK, he played percussion in several bands.

He has been a freelance journalist since 1992, writing for The Times, The Independent on Sunday Review, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and other major British publications.

In 2002, as part of an article on the National Forensic Academy, he visited the Body Farm in Tennessee. This last commission was the inspiration behind the internationally bestselling ‘The Chemistry Of Death’, which was shortlisted for the CWA’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger and has been translated into 21 languages. Simon Beckett is married and lives in Sheffield. The author of six novels, his second David Hunter thriller, ‘Written In Bone’, was published as a Bantam paperback in April 2008, followed by ‘Whispers Of The Dead’ in 2010, and ‘The Calling Of The Grave’ in the same year.

Links-http://www.simonbeckett.com/

Twitter @BeckettSimon @OrbitBooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n