This Scots author knows the power of a shocking twist

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When Nathan Cole touches down in Nashville for the funeral of his estranged father, the city’s top story is the disappearance of eight-year-old Chloe Xi. With each day that passes, the chances of finding her alive grow more remote. Naturally, at first, Nathan is more concerned with the circumstances of his father Lucas’s suicide. The abusive dad he fled years earlier for his own safety and sanity checked into a motel and hanged himself on a bathroom door.

Lucas Cole was the author of a successful series of schlocky, escapist thrillers. But the unpublished manuscript Nathan finds among his personal effects, The Midnight King, is unlike any of his other books. It appears to be a fictionalised account of his secret life as a serial killer, driven to kidnapping children by a compulsion to “complete” his family with a third child and disposing of them when they didn’t come up to his expectations.

Alongside the manuscript is a box containing souvenirs of his victims, including ribbons that can only belong to Chloe Xi. If she hasn’t yet died of starvation, the only person who knew her hiding place is dead.

The Midnight King (Image: free) The first person Nathan meets upon his return is his old school friend Isaac Holloway. Isaac also lived away from Nashville for many years, but has come back to work as a private investigator, picking up scraps of work and living in a motel, after blowing his career in the police force by losing control and beating a suspect half to death. As fate would have it, Chloe Xi’s parents have hired him because they didn’t think the police were doing a thorough enough job. Despite hostility from the cops investigating the case, and the flaring-up of his chronic stomach problem, Isaac starts to piece together what might have happened to her.

With both his central characters tense and running on frayed nerves, Ashkanani keeps us on edge throughout. Isaac is living with the disgrace of having been drummed out of the force and hasn’t been looking after himself for a long time. Nathan is having to come to terms with his father’s murderous legacy, as well as his and his sister Kate’s complicity in it by keeping quiet for all these years.

As evidence mounts up pointing to Lucas Cole as the real Music City Monster, who killed 13 children and murdered seven of their parents, the challenge is not only to locate Chloe in time but to make a convincing case for the innocence of the man convicted of the crimes, Edward Morrison, who is scheduled to be executed in less than a fortnight.

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Edinburgh-based solicitor Ashkanani won the Bloody Scotland Debut Award for his first novel, and he shows here what a good ear he has for the idioms of the contemporary American crime thriller, getting the taut, murky tone just right.

He also knows the power of a shocking twist, and has buried one in The Midnight King that takes the breath away and pushes an already dark book into really disturbing territory. It’s no surprise to discover that Ashkanani was turned on to crime fiction by Robert Harris’s Red Dragon: there’s a similar sense here of an author compelled to probe parts of the psyche others would prefer to leave alone.

The Midnight King feels like a challenge being laid down to the cream of American crime writers, that here is someone prepared to take them on at their own game. With a novel as confident, chilling and audacious as this, it won’t go unnoticed.