Rachel Reviews: The Lost Women by Tim Weaver

When you reach the end of a Tim Weaver, it's like getting off the dodgems at the fun fair. You've been pulled many different ways and feel a little disoriented after the experience and even though you were on edge during it, now you're out of it, you can sigh, let your heart rate settle and relish the fact that you've reached the end and it was fun while it lasted.

I mean, he really does know how to write a thriller that keeps you guessing and I think, as someone who reads an awful lot, not knowing exactly what is going to happen and not being able to predict the next step is something I am grateful for in the fiction of Mr. Weaver. I like to be surprised.

This is a David Raker book, David being a journalist turned private investigator who features in many of Weaver's books. In this book, he is hired by an actress, Ellie whose husband Preston has gone missing from a hospital and David is the man to find him, discreetly and quickly. This is the starting point on a winding, twisting plot path that leads us towards a village in Cornwall that disappears in the sand, to masked men swallowing cyanide capsules in the woods, to former adversaries coming to the forefront again, even though they are securely locked up.

Helped by Colm Healy, a former police officer, Raker follows the trail that opens up to him and which leads into the murky depths of past mysteries unsolved and interactions which threaten to upset the life that he is building for himself with his new partner, Rebekah.

The story has many interlinking threads and I admire a writer who can have so many ideas and be able to deliver them with aplomb. There is never any question of the plot being unsteady: Weaver leads you by the nose into the darker recesses of people's pasts and motives and you follow gamely, willing to be entertained.

I can't recommend his books enough if you want a thriller which is tense, full of great characterisation and dialogue and which displays the darker side of human nature in all its threatening glory.

Rachel Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ - a high 4