As an avid, and some may say, obsessive, reader of crime fiction, I am always on the hunt for something new and exciting to wet my appetite. Amazon, Waterstones and, while they still desperately hang onto life, some of the few remaining local indie bookshops, have become my playground to source out the wheat from the chaff and find my next read.
But, and it pains me to say this, I had just recently started to tire of the genre that I so love. I had become bored of reading, seemingly, the same novel re-hashing the same old story of a triple D cop (disheveled, divorced and drunk) and his desperate attempts to hunt down a nasty killer. Even authors billed as 'the next big thing' were treading the same boards and it seemed as though all imagination had disappeared. So, imagine my delight when this little gem of a novel skipped into my hands.
I have to be honest to begin with, that until I came across his, rather excellent, author website, www.timweaverbooks.com, after a boring morning at work trawling the internet, I hadn’t heard of Tim Weaver. But, after a short while reading through it and then checking out the, mainly five star, reviews for this, his debut novel, I had to see what all the fuss was about.
The novel centres on journalist, turned missing persons investigator, David Raker. Reeling from the death of his wife, Derryn, from cancer, he is approached with a request to look into the disappearance of a young man named Alex Towne, who vanished without word five years before, eventually turning up dead a year ago, in a car crash.
But, as Raker soon realises, this isn’t going to be just any run of the mill missing person’s case, because the real issue isn’t the reason why he went missing or indeed where he went. It isn’t even about his death. The real issue is why his mother, Mary, thinks she has recently seen her dead son, alive and well, in the street.
Driven by his own personal loss and the desire to help those in need, Raker agrees to take on the case, only to find himself thrown headlong into a dark world of lies, deceit and brutality, that takes him from the southern coast of Cornwall to Scotland, and pushes him further than he thought possible into a shocking world of human cruelty.
Tim Weaver has written one heck of an impressive novel that plays on the primal fears of darkness and devilry and steps onto the same playing field that authors such as Simon Kernick and Greg Hurwitz occupy, delving into the ordinary man in an extraordinary situation template. When you consider that Chasing the Dead is his debut, it makes it all the more of a marvelous achievement.
He leads the protagonist through a series of brilliant, and, at times, peak through your fingers as they cover your eyes, scary, set pieces that are alive with equal measures of pace and shocks, and read like the work of a seasoned pro.
In Raker he has created a character with a heart, and one that you can almost feel beating in every sentence. He’s a character that doesn’t rely on special skills or powers to fight his fight. He is real, impassioned and vulnerable. And if the opening couple of pages don’t leave you with a lump in your throat, then, well, there’s no hope.
To sum up, Chasing the Dead is a cracking good read, by an accomplished writer who - and I grow weary of writing this - deserves a bigger audience. But, after this, and the recent release of his second novel The Dead Tracks, I’m more than certain that Tim Weaver is here for the duration…or at least, I hope so.
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