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The Good Father is a complex and disturbing mystery centred on a nightmare scenario – a child going missing, along with the awful speculation of what might have happened, or be happening, to him. At the beginning of the book, Gordon Rutherford’s 7-year-old son, Rory, vanishes from the beach in front of his home in Fairlie, Ayrshire.

The story of his disappearance and its aftermath is told by Gordon and spans years: first is the adrenaline of Rory’s disappearance and the efforts to find him – encounters with the police (who “looked like kids in fancy dress”) and the ravenous media. The surging waves of denial, fear, guilt, desperation. There are also the horrors of social media and the spreading of rumours: “It was as if I had walked across a bridge, from a world where everything had its place to a world where nothing made sense.”

Gordon feels a “sense of rupture, a family dismemberment”. Everyone falls under suspicion – neighbours, friends, wider family members. Eventually Gordon and his wife Sarah, a lawyer, attempt to continue living their lives – doing ‘the messages’, going to the local pub. But they will always no longer be Gordon and Sarah, they will be the Rutherfords who lost their boy.

When Rory falls off the police radar (“It was their job. It was our life”), Gordon and Sarah team up with Gordon’s cousin Paul, an ex-cop, and Ian Kerr, the father of a boy who went missing in similar circumstances to those of Rory’s vanishing. The small group undertakes some amateur sleuthing, with some success – but with no authority to act the “little detection club” falls away. Years go by, Gordon and Sarah rebuild their lives. However, their lives will never be the same.

There is a wave of ecstasy when they get news that Rory’s been sighted, but Gordon is not surprised when they find out it’s a false lead. He discovers an online group with members from around the world dedicated to solving what happened to his son. Scarily the group has photos of Rory that Gordon has never seen, and some of the inside of their house. It is all unreal – a  parallel world. But Gordon and Sarah “had no idea what was coming down the pike.”

The Good Father ramps up into a tense sequence of plot twists that leave the reader reeling. As events unfold, questions are raised about how you can seek justice when you don’t know whom to trust. Whether unjust punishment can give you a credit for future bad behaviour. And at what point do you surrender the responsibility of trying to secure justice or fairness for those you love?

The Good Father skilfully presents a gripping suspenseful thriller whilst engaging the reader with the inner lives and motivations of the protagonists. Like McIlvanney himself, Gordon lectures on Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, and his narration is enriched by being smattered with Scottish verses and Scottish vernacular. There is an imperfection to the writing that portrays lives out of joint. Gordon and Sarah fumble around each other with ‘all at sea’ exchanges.

Reading The Good Father, I was reminded of the disturbing tone of Joyce Carol Oates’ Daddy Love – the thin veneer between the ‘normality’ of routine life and the abyss that can suddenly yawn beneath you in an instant of inattention. The difficulty of discerning the “The dumb bored badness of boys” from the evil they are capable of inflicting.

I highly recommend The Good Father, and urge you to avoid all spoilers!

The Book of Guilt is an alternate history of a dystopian Britain, and the bildungsroman of a boy called Vincent. It is a mystery to solve, and a #YeahNoir thriller. It is a cautionary tale of how we accept the benefits of our society whilst being wilfully blind to their origins. It is a vivid description of the tyrannical cruelty of those in power, readily recognised from actual history, and current regimes.

The book starts with thirteen-year-old Vincent living in an old country house with his two brothers, Lawrence and William. They are identical triplets: “their light green eyes, their thick blond hair, their full, curling mouths. How tall they were for their age.” They are part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme, and they are cared for by three women who take shifts: Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon, Mother Night. The boys’ lives are regulated, quite monotonous, but not unpleasant – apart from the random illnesses the boys are prone to catching, known generically as “the Bug”.

The reader is soon suspicious of the Scheme, which includes others, both boys and girls, in other Homes. It is strange but understandable that they are being taught from The Book of History, and that their transgressions are recorded in The Book of Guilt – but why does Mother Morning record their dreams each morning in The Book of Dreams? And surely there is something sinister about the ageing Dr Roach, the founder of the Scheme and overseer of the boys’ health?

We read the boys’ Home was once full of others, but the triplets are now the only ones: “How much quieter the Home was without all the other boys, we said; how rowdy they’d been.” We learn some of the other boys were monstrous. And the triplets are not identical in their personalities; one can be reprehensible at times. It becomes clear the triplets are captive: “If we went outside early enough we could see the low sun shining through the pieces of glass, shards of amber and emerald alight in the quiet morning”. When the government brings in a policy change and the boys are allowed into the village on errands, the villagers are suspicious of the children and are often mean to them.

The boys sometimes discuss leaving the Home, and they live in hope of following their fellows once they are clear of the Bug. Following them to the Big House in Margate, where they will play on the beach and visit the wonderful amusement park. The boys are a mystery, as too is Nancy a young girl in another town, living with her parents but similarly confined and kept hidden from the world. The reader starts guessing: the existence of the children is somehow linked to pragmatic and self-serving decisions made at the alternate ending to World War Two. And their future is linked to the Thatcher-ite regime that is ruling Britain in the alternate 1970s.

The regime brings in another change, to be under the auspices of the Minister of Loneliness, and the tension of the story starts to ramp up – when first visiting the boys, the Minister: “Slipped a vegetable knife into her handbag.” To say any more about developments would be to spoil what is a tense and astonishing read. The story has so many resonances as it relentlessly unfolds – there are so many ways groups of beings are marginalised in our society, seen as ‘other’, seen as objects not subjects: “We were ever so relieved when we found out it wasn’t an actual boy.”

The plotting of The Book of Guilt is exquisite – the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, the reader feeling horrified but also empathetic towards many in the story. It is, like the boys’ days, structured into The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge, and the Book of Guilt. Fittingly ending with an exploration of how society deals with its past crimes, and their victims. The overarching message: “It’s the community we need to worry about!”

The Book of Guilt is amusing in places, tragic in others, and very caring of its main protagonists. There is a tiny sliver of hope in the story too, as there are heroes. I really can’t speak highly enough about the experience of reading The Book of Guilt, it is going to stay with me for a long time. I highly recommend you read it too.

Hana Westerman’s life as an ex-cop in Tātā Bay, working with her dad on a driver training scheme for the local youth, is about to be shattered in many ways: Illness in the family, an impending wedding, a possible new relationship, desperate friends making wrong decisions, and a devastating event that leads to her facing the kind of offender no one “in the history of New Zealand policing has encountered before”.

Carved in Blood is full of characters that readers of Hana’s previous exploits will know, which makes her experiences this time around gripping, both emotionally and viscerally. Warmth and threat are woven throughout the novel. In the talk of Matariki: a time of reflection, of coming together, of valuing the dead; in the images of Hana being circled by a shark, “Its eyes never leaving her”.

In the wake of an horrific violent crime, Hana is sworn in as a temporary constable of the New Zealand Police. She finds herself once again in the conflicted position of being a Māori cop in a country where “Māori are one of the most incarcerated Indigenous races on the planet”, and she is tormented by the question: “Why the hell did this kid go and get a gun, walk into a shop and do the awful thing he did?”

The answer to that question is complicated and takes Hana to the Moon Lake Bistro and Lounge, a front for high stakes gambling and illicit imports, takes her back to her memories of a highly fortified gang pad, and requires her to visit a storage unit that may hold information that will overturn everything she knows about someone she loves.

There are new characters too, for instance Elisa Williams, head of the investigation. Williams is ex-SAS, having served in Afghanistan – she left when she felt she was part of “a painful and soul-destroying process of witnessing warring nations implode”. And there is Gracie Huia, young, staunch, pregnant, and seriously in need of someone to believe her side of the story.

Hana begins to suspect that the prevailing Police theory of the case is wrong, and gradually finds herself pushed to the edge – literally in one thrilling car chase. She digs deep to find stability: “Hana was trained to kill. But you do everything you possibly can to never pull the trigger.” However, she does find situations in her personal life that require a bit of flexibility – her daughter Addison commenting: “‘Sheesh, Mum … You believe in the rules, until you don’t.”

The plotting of Carved in Blood starts in slow motion and then takes off like a rocket. The mystery unfolds as the reader immerses themselves in Hana’s world. People both sides of the law will consider breaking it if they are desperate enough – or empathetic enough. Even the villain of the piece, “His mind is a sticky place. Nothing escapes”, is the victim of a swirl of situations, culminating in evil – just as weather conditions collide to form a serious storm with “as much rain in a day as would normally fall in three months” – a tense backdrop to escalating events.

The moral complexity of the characters is reflected by other contrasts. Rats are for many regarded negatively, a word for a snitch or a traitor, in the novel they symbolise horrific things happening in garden sheds – but “The tā moko artist explained – for us Māori, rats aren’t nasty, ugly things. They’re smart as hell … They’re tricksters, man. They can get themselves out of the shittiest situations”. Everything has another way of looking at it – I’ll never again have the same response to anyone suggesting “a visit to the Desert Road”!

One of the most poignant contrasts is that between those who are sent off in an unadorned wharenui and those who are sent off by tens of thousands at Eden Park. However, the novel makes the point that all lives become equal at Matariki: “All year long the navigator of the canoe collects the souls of those who have passed in a net. Then the waka disappears, and when it emerges again, the souls are released. And they become the new stars.”

An excellent continuation of the Hana Westerman series, Carved in Blood can be read as a stand-alone, but if you haven’t read the previous two instalments, you really should! And the novel finishes with indications of a next book in the series – great!

The Royal Free depicts the fracturing of a stable reality – personal, institutional, and societal. James Ballard is a grieving widower with a six-month-old daughter, Fiona. He is a copy editor at the Royal London Journal of Medicine, the: “third-oldest medical journal in the world.” The Royal London is dealing with the surrender to online-only publishing, and the deep-fake takeover of scientific journalism. Ballard’s apartment is in a housing estate being besieged by young thugs, and his London is one of constant riots and mayhem, sparked by the police-killing of a “29-year-old black man”.

In keeping with the themes of disintegration, The Royal Free meanders from intra-office politics and foibles to Ballard’s personal difficulties, to national and international chaos. The point of view changes, at one point even being that of Fiona, probably a Ballard projection, but maybe not. The only theme that is consistent is Ballard’s plodding digitisation of the journal’s multi-volume style guide. Such a Baroque urge to order and uniformity is a stark contrast to the surrounding pandemonium: “It was very quiet but for the sirens outside.”

“Nothing quite like a six-month-old baby to adjust your expectations of yourself.” Ballard finds himself wanting when, after farewelling Tatia (“23, Lithuanian, ‘economics student’”) after a week of Fiona-minding and sex-providing, he goes for a run. Leaving Fiona in the neglected apartment, alone. Shuker is an expert in the looming dread – the reader horrified at all the things that haven’t happened but that might. Ballard has similar forebodings when he encounters a group of youths on his return. And thereby starts a sequence of events, with at one point Ballard doing “a stupid, stupid thing” – “They  would come back for him.”

The Royal Free highlights how modern life is increasingly wanting of a style guide, of “man as an ordered political animal, civilisation, and its critique”. There is no madness in a way, as all is madness. People behave as though they’re avatars in an online platform game, hurling rocks and bottles at anything, to see if they get a reward. First responders must often curtail treatment to just get the injured to a hospital. Or those wanting to cheer up the masses with entertainment end up regretting their choice. There is little social cohesion: catching public transport is to enter the domain of an individual – a driver who will rip you off, and who you have to just hope will take you to your intended destination.

Ballard loses himself in the monotony of the style guide. He and his colleagues appear a nit-picking, arrogant lot – an editor’s job is to be judgemental after all. And they are in the specific field of the medical – a group that don’t know the meaning of “petrichor” but don’t stumble over “vesicovaginal and rectovesical fistulas”. They edit “A Patient’s Tale” by a young Nigerian woman, an awful tale geographically distant from themselves – little knowing how soon her plight might be one befalling those closer at hand. They are more concerned with their journal going solely online. Some compare it to the fate of the OED: “Gives the word ‘Help’ in the menu bar a whole different feel, doesn’t it?”

The arc of the book, really a rapid descent into darkness, is provided by Ballard – his discoveries in Fiona’s nursery, a decapitated cat nailed to his door grill, his ending up always walking with a knife in his pocket. However, themes also emerge through the stories of his workmates: Dr Ibrahim al-Reyes, impeccable, dealing with the trauma of personal atrocities in Syria, watching horror movies with “the sense of cruising hostility and blankness”. The terrifying commute to work for Annabel Pitti, after her bike has been stolen out of her backyard shed. Kristian Shattuck, losing his sight, desperately volunteering for more and more work, making more and more mistakes – “words holding together the things that are falling apart”.

The book is like the sexist banter of some of the Royal London staff: “a weird, doomed fin-de-siècle finality that soon became a lurching inevitability.” All characters are fraught and flawed, the only judicious character being an uncanny Rhodesian Ridgeback. I think The Royal Free will be polarising; there will be those who worry that it doesn’t hold together, and those that think that that is Shuker’s point. The novel itself disintegrates. I was initially destabilised by the book, but I ended up finding it riveting. And increasingly disturbing the more I recognised that for many in this world, what is described would be their own non-negotiable, lawless reality.