Well it’s the bank holiday weekend and I hope everyone has lots of reading planned? If you’re stuck and not sure what to read then I’d like to suggest a book, Mr Todd’s Reckoning by Iain Maitland which I have the pleasure of sharing my review for as part of the blog tour today thanks to Ruth Killick and Saraband Books for the opportunity.
About the book
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.
Mr Todd’s Reckoning is available to purchase now – Amazon
My thoughts
Well I have to say that Iain Maitland is a genius, what a book Mr Todd’s Reckoning is.
Mr Todd is our narrator in this book. He’s a retired tax inspector living in a bungalow with his son Adrian who drives him crazy. Adrian suffers from OCD, he doesn’t work, he doesn’t seem to have any friends and the relationship between Father and Son seems pretty much non existent. They both share the tiny bungalow and try not to get in each other’s way.
You can’t help feeling sorry for Mr Todd, he didn’t plan on taking early retirement, it was forced on him by HMRC and by the way he speaks he was quite good and took pride in his job. He’s now found himself stuck in his tiny bungalow on a noisy street with his son in the middle of heatwave and it’s taking him all his strength not to blow his top.
I said at the start that Iain Maitland is a genius, well I better explain that a bit further. With this story the author pulls you into a false sense of security. I honestly thought that by reading the blurb and with the first few chapters I knew what I was getting from this book but there was an underlying sense of unease and as I got further into the story it became clear that I had been fooled and that underlying unease came fully to the surface and I discovered a much, much darker story.
The author really knows how to set a scene and bring the characters to life. I could easily picture them in my head as I was reading, I could feel the intense heat and hear the annoying sounds of the snip, snip, snipping or the clanging that Adrian made and as I progressed through the story the real life sounds from my own house set me on edge, it’s a very un-nerving feeling but it’s so good when a story makes you feel like that.
It’s difficult to tell you more about this story as I really don’t want to give anything away and spoil the enjoyment for anyone, I want you to get the same out of it as I did. What I will say though is that Mr Todd’s Reckoning isn’t what I was expecting, not in the slightest. It’s dark, it’s quite tense and it’s a story that I won’t easily forget.
A really fantastic read and one I’ll definitely be recommending.
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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.
Connect – Iain on Twitter | Saraband on Twitter | Website
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