The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North

4 Stars from me

There is a sharp eerie undercurrent through this book, it would make for a brilliant mini-series – I can visualise the scene where teenage Dan has a brush with the killer, the dirty toilets, the fear, the isolation, the feeling of impotence, but above all that whistle. Ugh, shudder!

I felt so desperately sorry for Dan, what a thing to carry with you through life. The knowledge that you let the killer vanish with their victim. It’s unsurprising really that he became a criminal psychiatrist, devoting his life to understanding the mind of depraved killers almost as a kind of perpetual recompense for walking away as a child.

The story is a split narrative of Dan’s attempts to retrace his father’s steps in his attempts to trace the killer and the clues, alongside the story of the killer and his victims. The timelines mirror and blur, creating ever more questions as each layer is uncovered.

Overall a thoroughly enjoyable thiller, which kept me guessing. My thanks to the author, NetGalley and Penguin Random House for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Blurb: You never forget the day you meet a serial killer. Dan was just a teenager when he had a chance encounter with the elusive killer known only as “the man made of smoke”. Nobody could blame him for being too scared to intervene, for being too scared to save the latest victim, for letting the killer vanish again.

Nobody except Dan himself. Years later, Dan has a successful career as a criminal psychiatrist, unpicking the very darkest of human behaviour. Because, despite what he saw that day, Dan knows there’s no such thing as a monster.

But now his father, John, has gone missing. And, when Dan returns to the small island where he grew up, he finds out that not long before his disappearance, John had stumbled across a body. As Dan begins to dig, he finds unsettling links, stretching all the way back to the man made of smoke.

Which means this might just be a chance to not only save his dad, but to finally find redemption.
But what if he’s been wrong about that day for all these years.

What if he was right to be scared?