Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Simon Toyne’s The Black Highway, which is out now.

Forensic specialist Laughton Rees is not ashamed of her checkered past—after all, her youthful indiscretions led to the birth of her daughter Gracie, the person she loves most in the world—but when Gracie’s father unexpectedly turns up in their lives again, Laughton is automatically wary.

Shelby Facer is a dangerous man, formerly imprisoned for his involvement in an international drug trafficking ring, and no matter what Laughton once felt for him, she doesn’t want him anywhere near Gracie. But when Shelby claims that he has information about an especially difficult murder case she is working, she can’t turn him down.

A body with no head or hands has recently turned up in the river Thames, and the police are at a loss until Shelby identifies the man. The victim was part of a highly secretive smuggling ring Shelby was involved with during his and Laughton’s youth—which Laughton’s father, former commissioner for the Metropolitan police, was investigating before he died.

Laughton throws herself into her father’s old files to try to trace the connections between past and present, but as she and DCI Tannahill Khan circle closer to the truth, the case becomes dangerously personal. When another body turns up, mutilated just like the first, the victim is no stranger to Laughton. She’ll have to face the darkest parts of her past to find the man behind the murders—before he takes away everything she loves.

CHAPTER ONE

The red evening sky and sharp lines of London reflect in the warped liquid mirror of the Thames. It looks like one of those heavily filtered images from a travel blog, or a tourist website, or it would if not for the corpse in the foreground.

The dead man lies on his back close to the river’s edge, his tailored suit still managing to look good despite the foul black mud soaked deep into the pale blue of the waterlogged wool. It is not the sort of thing some desolate street suicide would wear, the type who regularly jumped in the river to end it all, suggesting that the man falls into the other main category of river victim, the fatal accident: a drunken dare and a leap from a jetty or a party boat that quickly turned tragic. But that is not what happened here. Even from his position high on the embankment, DCI Tannahill Khan can see that much.

He works quickly, wriggling and rustling his way into a fresh paper suit as the CSI team set up screens to hide the body from the swelling crowd on the embankment. There’s an added feeling of urgency with this one, not just because of the exposed and public nature of the crime scene, but because the floater—the blunt name the river police call all bodies found in the Thames—has been discovered at low tide, and the slack, mirrored water of the Thames is already starting to buckle with the current as the water level begins to rise. In less than half an hour the spot where the body is now lying will be submerged again, along with any evidence that might be found by it.

Tannahill fastens the paper suit at the neck, sets his camera running, then heads down the steep stone steps to the riverbank, being careful to capture into evidence every worn stone stair, though he’s pretty sure neither killer nor victim would have used them. Floaters are called that for a reason, and the spot where a body is pulled from the river is rarely the same place it entered.

Tannahill reaches the muddy, gravel-and-litter-choked slope of the upper bank and holds for a slow count of ten on a wide shot of the whole scene: the body center frame, a fast-response MPU boat idling on the river a few meters from shore ready to transport the body if needed, and the London skyline rising up behind, dark and ominous, the twin tourist magnets of Tower Bridge in front of him and the Tower of London at his back.

Tannahill zooms in, steadying his hand until the image settles on the paper-suited form of the forensic pathologist hunched over the body and taking initial measurements—lividity, core body temperature—trying to establish a rough time of death to help them work out how long the body has been in the water. Getting useful postmortem readings from a floater is notoriously difficult, the near freezing waters of the Thames chilling the body rapidly and ruining all the usual scales of measurement. Even so, murder scene protocol has to be followed, and the pathologist has to finish doing their thing before he can start doing his.

He studies the paper-suited figure trying to figure out which pathologist is on duty tonight, and therefore how speedy this process is likely to be. The figure moves, almost as if sensing his scrutiny, and a darkly made-up Cleopatra eye flashes briefly in his direction before returning to the corpse. Even with the surgical mask covering most of her face Tannahill recognizes Dr. Evelyn Prior, one of the more senior officers on the roster, with a reputation for being incredibly thorough and utterly uncompromising. It won’t matter to her that the tide is rising, or that he is waiting for her to finish the primary examination. She’ll take as long as she needs, then immediately start leaning on him to release the body so she can take it away to conduct a proper autopsy.

Tannahill stops recording and taps his fingers against the side of the camera, anxious to get on with his work but powerless to speed things up. He takes a deep breath, catching the rot-and-algae-salted tang of the river at the back of his throat, then pulls his phone from his pocket. He calls a recently dialed number and looks up at the darkening sky as it starts to ring.

“Hey.” Laughton Rees answers sounding breathless, like she’s hurrying home for the evening he is about to torpedo.

“Hey,” Tannahill says. “Listen . . . something’s come up.”

“Oh.” He hears the disappointment in Laughton’s voice. “Are we talking slight delay or total write-off?”

“Hard to say. A body washed up just down the river from you.”

“On the north side, just by Tower Bridge?”

“Yes, how did you know that?”

“Bodies wash up at that spot all the time, something to do with the particular curve of the riverbank and the way the current flows. When they built Tower Bridge they actually incorporated a temporary mortuary in the foundations so they could leave the washed-up bodies there on public display to help identify them. It’s called Dead Man’s Hole.”

Tannahill smiles. He loves the fact that Laughton knows so many macabre things about so many macabre subjects. They have been seeing each other for nearly eight months now, but he is still constantly impressed and beguiled by her. “Can you imagine if we still did that today?” he says. “Lined up murder victims on the side of the road for people to gawp at?”

“We do,” Laughton replies, “it’s called the internet. If Dead Man’s Hole was still a thing, someone would stick a webcam on the place with the hashtag #doyouknowthisperson.”

Tannahill glances up at the crowd on the embankment, their phones held aloft as they try to get a glimpse of the body, some undoubtedly live streaming. “Yeah, well,” he murmurs into his phone, “sadly a public identity parade would not be much help with this particular body.”

“Really, how so?”

Over at the river’s edge Dr. Evelyn Prior finally stands up and step away from the body, giving Tannahill his first close and clear view of it, lying in the mud in its expensive suit — only with no head, and no hands.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘The Black Highway’ by Simon Toyne appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

We chat with author Simon Toyne about his latest novel Dark Objects, which is out this week!

Hi Simon, we’re excited to hear about your new book, DARK OBJECTS.   

DARK OBJECTS is a twisty, fast-paced, psychological suspense thriller set in present-day London. It starts with a glamorous woman found brutally murdered in her sleek, architect-designed mansion. She has no formal identity so officially doesn’t exist, no alarms were tripped, no forensics were left behind, and the only clues are four strange objects arranged around the body: a unicorn toy, some old war medals, a set of keys that don’t fit any lock in the house, and a book on forensics and police procedure written by Dr. Laughton Rees.

Laughton, a brilliant but troubled and reclusive academic struggling to raise her teenage daughter alone, finds herself dragged onto the front pages by the media storm that whips up around the bizarre murder and the belief that her book helped the killer cover their tracks.

Realizing that the fastest way to return her life to normal is to solve the mystery, Laughton breaks her own golden rule to never work live cases and agrees to share her considerable expertise with the investigation. But as the objects gradually begin to reveal the identity of both killer and victim, Laughton realizes they also contain specific messages about the childhood trauma that shattered her life and eventually turned her into a recluse. Her childhood was stolen away by one killer, now she must catch another before her daughter’s is destroyed too.

You’ve mentioned you’re a fan of Charles Dickens. How has his work influenced your writing?

I don’t know a single writer who isn’t a fan or hasn’t been influenced by Dickens in some way. He’s so influential that when you think about Victorian London what you’re picturing is Dickensian London, the one he described so vividly in books as varied as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations.

He’s also brilliant at taking complex ideas, particularly ones of social and economic problems, and dramatizing them in a way that makes them understandable and compelling and has this incredible ability to tell a story that incorporates the whole of society, from Lords to street sweepers and everybody in between. This is something I tried to emulate in DARK OBJECTS. I take the story all over London—from the Home Secretary and Chief Police Commissioner to a teenage runaway, living on the streets—guiding the reader on a journey through a darker and more unfamiliar London.

Why set DARK OBJECTS in London?

DARK OBJECTS is the first novel I’ve set in my native England. All the locations in the book are real places: the Murder Mansion, Suicide Bridge, New Scotland Yard, the Old Chelsea Nick, the offices of The Daily—all genuine parts of a very real, modern London.

The mansion where the murder takes place is called the Eldridge House which sits on the edge of Highgate Cemetery. Highgate Cemetery is a fantastically opulent and overgrown Victorian cemetery that looks like an enchanted wood filled with lop-sided tombs and gravestones and has quite a few famous people buried there—Karl Marx, author George Eliot, George Michael, the actress Jean Simmons.

I used to live in Archway, which is at the bottom of Highgate Hill. I know the area well and had always been intrigued by this striking, modern, steel and glass house overlooking the graveyard. I was inspired to set the murder there.

Many writers spend much of their writing time in isolation. How did Covid affect you and your work life?

Covid and lockdown meant having to share the house with my wife and three kids instead of being on my own between the hours of 8 and 4. Being a writer means you have no real structure so you either need to create some or cleave to a pre-existing one. Lockdown shattered my structure entirely. I had to create a new one in order to keep working, which mostly involved getting up a few hours earlier than the rest of our household.

I wrote a lot of DARK OBJECTS sitting up in bed, which was not ideal for my back and may have partly inspired the scene in the middle of the book where someone else is trapped in a bedroom against their will.

How do true crime stories fit into your work? Is DARK OBJECTS based on a particular case?

I think true crimes fascinate all of us, and crime writers are no exception. As I was prepping DARK OBJECTS, I was filming a true crime TV show called Written in Blood where I interviewed various bestselling crime writers such as Tess Gerritsen and Karin Slaughter about the real crimes that had inspired their work. One of the stories involved a double murder in Glasgow in the early eighties, where two women were killed in separate attacks. In each case the killer emptied the contents of their handbags and laid them out in a neat line. There was something very macabre and disturbing about that detail and it stuck with me and ended up being one of the hallmarks of my killer in DARK OBJECTS. I was reminded of the adage, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” It’s another reason why people love true crime I think; an editor would probably make me take out half the things I encountered when making this show because they would say it was implausible or unbelievable. Alas….

DARK OBJECTS is your seventh novel. Do you view this novel as an evolution? What can we expect next?

My first three novels were compared to Dan Brown and my next two to Stephen King and Lee Child. DARK OBJECTS has been compared by early readers to Thomas Harris.  I think the stories I’m telling have shifted in tone and subject over the years. Having said that, I think all of my books are fundamentally still the same at their core. All of them have a big mystery at their heart, which complex characters attempt to solve through the course of the story. All of them have multiple twists and are carefully put together in a way that hopefully makes the reader get to the end of one page and turn another, get to the end of one chapter and say “just one more” until they close the book at three in the morning still wondering what’s going to happen to the characters next. And so, as to what’s next, I’ve already written a first draft of a follow up to DARK OBJECTS.

The post Q&A: Simon Toyne, Author of ‘Dark Objects’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.