The Killing Choice

A Friday evening walk in Crystal Palace Park turns into a nightmare for Karl Suleman and his daughter Leah when a masked knife-wielding attacker jumps out of the bushes and threatens them, presenting Karl with an impossible choice. If he stays, he’ll be killed but if he walks away, their assailant will spare Leah – after he’s raped her. Only moments before, Karl had said he’d do anything to protect his daughter. Now that claim is about to be tested.

Leah urges her father to leave her. Karl is terrified, both for himself and his daughter, then he makes a choice that will forever haunt him. He runs, trying to find help, but almost immediately hears his daughter scream and he knows that help isn’t going to come in time. He dashes back, to find Leah lying in a pool of blood, dead. He’s failed her in the worst way possible and will now have to live with that choice as he faces trial by the press and by a jury of his peers, posting online comments and talking about him everywhere. His wife can’t forgive him. He can’t forgive himself.

DI Alex Finn, investigating Leah’s murder, is carrying his own grief, too. He’s still not been able to move on from the death of his wife and is increasingly taking refuge in alcohol. He’s doing a good job of covering up his problems, but blunt, no-nonsense DC Mattie Paulson suspects that her boss isn’t doing nearly as well as he likes to make out.

The investigation stalls, but then someone else is offered an impossible choice, and Finn and Paulson are left trying to make a series of ever more improbable connections between the two cases as pressure mounts, both from their superiors and the media.

The Killing Choice came at a good time for me. I was desperate for a good solid cop story, and Will Schindler’s second outing for the Finn/Paulson duo fitted that bill. I enjoyed their first outing in The Burning Men. Yes, they’ve got baggage, what fictional cops haven’t? But neither are so weighed down by their issues that it becomes all-consuming.

Finn is doing his best, despite his problems, and his colleagues like him, whereas Paulson isn’t everyone’s cup of cop-shop tannin-flavoured beverage; she’s direct to the point of rudeness at times, and almost as single-minded as her boss, but Finn works well with her, and her manner is water off a duck’s back with him. Skegman, their long-suffering DCI, is another likeable character. He’s gruff and happy to drive the team hard, but he also knows when to let Finn have his head and follow less obvious lines of enquiry.

The tension steadily ramps up as the storylines become both entangled and unpredictable. Schindler peoples the book with characters that really came to matter to me, including drug-dealing Haydon, estranged from his dad Isaiah, a big anti-knife crime campaigner on the tough estate where Haydon and his younger brother Mikey were brought up. There’s very little that’s obvious about The Killing Choice, and just when I thought I had a handle on what was going on, the sand under my feet shifted again and I had to start all over again.

If Schindler keeps up this quality of writing he’ll quickly become my go-to person for a great police thriller.