Book review: Plot barrels along in deft thriller

'Never to be Found' is inspired by the johatsu tradition in Japan, where a covert industry helps those who wish to vanish without a trace

Jo Spain’s latest book is a twisty thriller set in England and Japan. Picture: Maura Hickey

• Never to be Found
• Jo Spain
• Zaffre, €15.99

Since rising to prominence a decade ago, Jo Spain has become a prolific bestselling crime writer; the author of 14 novels, many of them involving the dogged Dublin police detective Tom Reynolds, whose exploits she is currently adapting for the small screen. 

And there’s a whiff of the TV miniseries off her latest book, too, a twisty thriller set in England and Japan.

Veronica Page disappears people for a living. 

Inspired by the johatsu tradition in Japan, where a covert industry helps those who wish to vanish without a trace, Veronica works alone and offers a discreet service to carefully selected clients. 

Many of them are women escaping abusive relationships, others have simply come to the end of themselves, or are on the run from rising mountains of debt.

A network of operatives specialising in passport forging and covert transport help her to relocate her clients, and each covers the other’s tracks so that no one knows too much about where the disappeared have vanished to. 

Business has been good, so good that Veronica can afford to live in a luxury Brighton penthouse and drink champagne with her on-off boyfriend Jonah. 

Him she keeps at a distance, refusing to commit to an intimate relationship that might expose her deepest secrets.

She has plenty of those but convinces herself that she does her job for the right reasons, and that in disappearing desperate folk she has done more good than harm. 

Then a police detective called Seb Ashcroft turns up, and changes Veronica’s mind.

A year or so previously, Veronica had helped a man called Gary Hewson, who had lost his wife and home and claimed to be crippled by debt. 

Going on her gut, Veronica believed him, but now Seb tells her his name wasn’t Gary at all — it’s Mark Drake, who’s wanted by police for the brutal murder of his wife and her sister.

This book’s style is flat and blunt but that is the way with these thrillers: the chapters are short and so are the sentences — nothing should distract you from the plot. 

That, in fairness, barrels along, as Seb and Veronica travel first to Cambridge, thence to York, on the trail of a man who may well be a serial killer.

And in a series of flashbacks we journey to Japan to locate the source of Veronica’s underlying angst.

Veronica Page is prone to spouting bland aphorisms, like: ‘Love. It’s asking to be hurt.’ 

Her locutions can be convoluted. ‘I flick switches as I go,’ she says, on entering a spooky house, ‘conning myself into believing an overhead bulb will be enough to counter the darkness that lives there.’

Jo Spain is better at writing about Brighton or York than she is about Osaka, and the Japan she summons in those misty flashbacks might have been more compelling. 

But the whole johatsu sub-plot is fascinating, and Ms Spain astutely investigates the culture of shame that makes deliberate disappearance so common in Japan.

Veronica’s friendship with a wise and forbearing Japanese priest is touching, and a sub-plot involving a historical disappearance is atmospherically evoked.

Fit and lean and sharp-dressing, Veronica is like a cross between Lara Croft and Bridget Jones: she’s not afraid to canter across country on the trail of violent criminals, but obsesses about what she eats and drinks, and at one point has some major misgivings about a midweek bottle of malbec.

I’m not sure she’s especially believable. But I do believe this book would make a zippy TV procedural, and that a sequel is by no means out of the question.

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