Today it's my turn on the BlogTour Mr Todd's Reckoning by Iain Maitland. It's dark psychological crime fiction with no ground rules or boundaries.
About the Author
Iain Maitland is the author of the thriller Sweet William (2017) as well as two non-fiction books on mental health: Dear Michael, Love Dad (2016) and Out of the Madhouse (2018). An ambassador for Stem4, the teenage mental health charity, Iain also speaks on mental health issues in the workplace. A writer since 1987, he is a journalist and has written more than 50 books, mainly on business, which have been published around the world.
Follow @iainmaitland @SarabandBooks on Twitter, on Goodreads, on Facebook,
Visit iainmaitland.net
Buy Mr Mr Todd's Reckoning
About the book
Norman Bates is alive and well… He's living just next door
Behind the normal door of a normal house, in a normal street, two men are slowly driving each other insane. One of them is a psychopath.
The father Mr Todd is at his wits’ end. He’s been robbed of his job as a tax inspector and is now stuck at home... with him. Frustrated. Lonely. Angry. Really angry.
The son Adrian has no job, no friends. He is at home all day, obsessively chopping vegetables and tap-tap-tapping on his computer. And he’s getting worse, disappearing for hours at a time, sneaking off to who-knows-where?
The unholy spirit in the safety of suburbia, one man has developed a taste for killing. And he’ll kill again.
This was a nice little surprise. I do enjoy the kind of creepy disturbing read that stays with you for a while.
Mr Todd lives with his son Adrian in a bungalow. It's an odd, boring and claustrophobic existence. It is for Mr Todd, perhaps not for Adrian, but then he is busy looking for his next thrill.
It's fascinating how Mr Todd paints himself as the saviour, the good man and the person everyone likes to pick on. He likes to overlook his little 'mistakes' that have led to his isolated lifestyle. It is much more important to shed a big spotlight on his son, the one with the real issues.
He is doing his duty as father and as a citizen by keeping track of what his grown son is up to. The man who has a history of complaints and deviancy, and it appears he is working himself up to perpetrating even worse crimes. So Mr Todd waits and watches.
As he does so, the reader is privy to the way Mr Todd is irritated by sounds, noise, people, perhaps just life in general. Maitland describes this slow and steady increase in annoyance very well. It's amazing how powerful single words can be just snip, snip, snipping away at someone's sanity. It's a testament of writing skill when a reader is taken on the same path as the character, then again perhaps some of us have our own closets with secrets and skeletons in them.
It's dark psychological crime fiction with no ground rules or boundaries. Whatever the reader expects to happen, well don't get too comfortable because it probably won't happen the way you expect it to. Kudos to Maitland for not giving us the ending we expect, but rather the one we deserve because of the unquenchable thirst we have for the bizarre, the morbid and always for the unexpected.
Buy Mr Todd's Reckoning at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: *Contraband; pub date 25 April 2019. Buy at Amazon com.
*Contraband: Mr Todd's Reckoning is published by Contraband, Saraband's cime fiction imprint, the publishers of man Booker-shortlisted Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project and Falling Fast by Neil Broadfoot and DM for Murder by Matt Bendoris, both shortlisted for Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year.
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