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!