Dominic Nolan's debut novel is standout. A brilliant concept - a cop who has forgotten everything about her former life who seeks to find herself by completing her last case - brilliantly carried out.
Abigail Boone is investigating a missing person case when she is kidnapped, abused, and thrown out of the window of a block of flats. Her injuries alone would probably have ended her police career but there's the added problem of amnesia. Apart from the last few minutes of her ordeal - trying to escape, falling - there's nothing. Her husband and teenage son are strangers. She now thinks of herself as Boone, a new person.
A couple of friends stick by her - an exploited young woman she rescued and her gangster father; one fellow female cop. Husband and son do their best but Boone cannot find the love that must have been there before. Slowly but surely she tracks down the other woman who was in the flat the night she fell, then the gangsters themselves. The climax is genuinely thrilling but Nolan also manages to keep the tension taut for all the 400 pages, which is some achievement for a first-time novelist.
I have read a number of highly-touted young British crime writers over the last couple of years. I have now read two of Dominic Nolan's three novels and have made up my mind: Nolan is the one to follow.
