To The Last Page

There's a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from a well-constructed thriller, even if it follows a familiar pattern, one that draws you in and leads you by the nose through the steps of escalation from initial criminal act (usually murder) through the investigation, complications and twists to resolution. What I find even more thrilling is a book that presents you with a highly unusual circumstance from the outset that seems almost impossible, meaning that you have no way of guessing where it is going to go from one page to the next. That's great of course, as long of course as the author provides a suitable, credible and necessarily inventive resolution. I'm afraid that Will Dean just doesn't follow though on what he sets up at the start of The Last Passenger . The novel certainly delivers in the WTF stakes right from the start, as Caroline Ripley, after only one night aboard the transatlantic liner RMS Atlantica, wakes up to find that everyone else on the ship ...

Human trafficking is a pretty nasty business. You think you know how bad it is and have maybe come across some news reports and true stories about it, but living through it is probably a lot worse than you imagine. There are certainly a few well-documented accounts of young women abducted as children who have been kept in sex slavery for years, but it’s still hard to imagine how traumatic and damaging an experience that can be. You would hope that Will Dean’s fictional story of just such an occurrence with a young Asian woman in T he Last Thing to Burn might make it a little more palatable but the experience and circumstances of Thanh Dao is still horrific enough, so horrific that what keeps you reading is the hope – and since it is fiction not unreasonably have some expectation – that there’s a way out of it. And if you can feel like that, then you have some idea of what keeps Thanh Dao going, kept captive in a farmhouse in the north of England. To Lenn, the farmer, her name is Jane,...