It has been a while since I read a book as quickly as I yesterday read Neil Cross' latest masterpiece of suspense, Captured.
Last year, with the creepy Burial, Cross almost had me delving into the final pages for a dishonourable peek at the conclusion because the suspense was near unbearable. With Captured the compulsion to get to the end of the story was every bit as strong, although this time I was not tempted to cheat.
Instead, the reader is led in a rush through a beautifully constructed story that Cross whips along with great speed and ever-rising tension.
Kenny Drummond, a solitary artist, is diagnosed as having a terminal brain tumour and told by doctors he has just a few weeks, at best, to live. In response, Kenny makes a list of those people he has somehow let down during the course of his live and sets out to put things right with them, irrespective of the fact that three of the four people on the list have been out of his life for decades.
He quickly crosses two of those off the list, and is left with his ex-wife Mary and a girl he knew at junior school, who was kind to him at a time when others were not. He discovers that the girl, now a married woman named Caroline Reese, disappeared in a highly publicised case some years earlier.
With his condition worsening by the day, and knowing time is running out for him, Kenny sets out to try and find out what happened to her. In the process he brings himself and friends into danger as he sets off a series of events that threatens the delicate equilibirum of many lives.
There are two elements to Cross's writing that really lift these books into the "special" category. The first is the characterisation. Captured is not a long book, and some of the minor characters have relatively brief roles. But while brief, often critical, and Cross takes care to make them work within the story in a consistent and credible way that is highly impressive. Secondly, as perhaps befits a former lead scriptwriter for Spooks, he understands how to keep a plot going from start-to-finish, consistently lifting the tempo and the tension levels, while at the same time keeping the reader guessing.
