This is a crime series that specialises in sidestepping conventions, always to exhilarating effect…These books succeed in harnessing all the genre's addictive power while maintaining a complexity and fascination entirely their own'.

Children have been vanishing. There are. no leads, no closure for the families - just a kidnapper-at large. The police have failed, the families are distraught and morale at Lafferton station has collapsed. Then Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler receives a call: a child has been snatched in Yorkshire. Has fhe abductor struck again? And will they find this child alive?

In The Risk of Darkness Simon Serrailler takes on serial killing and kidnap, and evil and innocence. This is a compulsively readable and often chilling novel.