The King of Terrors

“Hell, sir, I haven’t seen anything like this in all the time I’ve been on the force.” He took a cigarette from a silver case, offered me one, which I refused. “Are you sure you don’t want one?’ he said as he flicked his lighter into life and touched the flame to the end of the cigarette. “You might find you’ll need it.”It begins in the year 1929. DCI Thomas Rayne discovers the decomposed and dismembered body of an unknown man in a Suffolk barn, a strange black symbol painted on the barn wall. A crime that Inspector Rayne never solved. A case he would go to his death calling his Curse.Eighty years later guilt-ridden Gareth Davies seeks a quiet life in rural Wales following the suicide of his one-time mentor and friend. But his self-enforced solitude is soon to be violently shattered. Driving home one night in a snowstorm he knocks down and nearly kills a mysterious young woman in a country lane.He doesn’t know it but his life will never be the same again. The woman claims to be his twin sister Erica – a sister he never knew he had, because his unknown mother abandoned him in 1976 as a baby at Cardiff Central railway station. But his newfound sister brings with her a dire warning: his life is in great danger. When she disappears unexpectedly, he decides he must find her. That’s when his nightmare truly begins.Police find false ID papers in a Manchester flat, bearing Davies’ photo; a flat in which a woman has been murdered, the details of the gruesome murder mirroring those exactly of the man found in the barn by DCI Rayne in 1929. Why is Davies being followed by a strange Canadian man? Why is ninety-year-old Sir David Lambert-Chide, wealthy pharmaceutical giant, desperate to find Davies’ sister too? Who is the attractive but mysterious red-haired woman who warns him he is being hunted by the deadly Doradus? And who or what exactly is Doradus?What becomes clear is that someone wants him dead, whilst others want him very much alive. His life in the balance, he finds he’s being hunted for reasons he cannot fathom, with no one to turn to and not knowing who to trust.The King of Terrors is a breathtaking rollercoaster of a thriller that never lets up from its gripping and mystifying beginning to its shocking conclusion. With an array of well-drawn, memorable characters, its many delicious twists and turns and its complex, intelligently written plot, this is D. M. Mitchell at his most ingenious, dark and profound.