Experiments in Murder

Harry Fisher grows up in a five-bedroom Edwardian house across the River Lune from Lancaster city centre: a withdrawn mother, a powerful father forever abroad building his haulage empire, an older brother he was never close to and a housekeeper to keep things running. Left to himself, Harry finds company in Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and documentaries about real killers, along with an obsession with the one name everyone remembers precisely because he was never identified.

A single impulsive act on the quayside in 1985 convinces Harry of two things: that taking a life can be astonishingly easy, and that it means nothing without an investigation to outwit. As forensic science advances, he draws up a set of rules he must never break, and uses his family's international connections to build a career as an interpreter: fluent in more than ten languages, trusted with his clients' confidences, and free to come and go.

Then the experiments begin. A feud between two neighbours. A stranger whose trainers are several sizes bigger than Harry's own. Snowdrops in a clearing in Witherslack Woods. Each is planned in meticulous detail, built so that the police will find precisely what they are looking for. Meanwhile, Harry's work for Anatoly Crane, a Moscow computer-security magnate who is not averse to bending the rules, introduces him to a drug he first sees used in an anaesthetic room, and to people who make problems disappear for good.

But some officers aren't satisfied with the answers the evidence gives them. Closer to home, his housekeeper Joanna Nelson, who has known him all her life, sees far more than he realises. And every experiment produces something Harry never planned for: feelings he cannot reason away. From the Lancashire coast to the Russian underworld, his story builds to a finale that will leave readers desperate to know what happens next.