This is the heart of a beautifully constructed novel: a portrait of a bad man, a very real, familiar bad man. He is Albert, walking through the normal world after experiencing a totally different, frightening, scarring perspective on it. They have one shared interest, The Artifex, a children's TV program where Fran works on set, and Daniel has been promised special access to the studio.

As always, Wood has delivered a book that is utterly compelling and hard to put down, well written and easy to read.Whether he does it because of deep-seated psychotic rage, a sense of entitlement, a combination of the two, or something else entirely isn’t ever made clear, and doesn’t really need to be. Whilst I appreciate that the story doesn’t end at the key event, but explores the aftermath and effect on our narrator’s life, the tone changed, morphing into a more prosaic and factual recount of many years. We know that something bad is coming, we don’t know what and we don’t know how, we just have to strap in and follow along. The back cover of my proof of this doesn’t give much away: merely the names and relationship of our two protagonists, Francis and Daniel Hardesty, father and son, and the promise of a road trip that ends in an explosion of violence, which continues to haunt Daniel twenty years after the fact.

Driven by an implacable self-righteousness, he is ill equipped to deal with the least sign of failure and, as his best-laid plans go seriously awry, he ends up being transfigured into a full-on sociopath, while his increasingly desperate son watches. I have a ridiculous amount of books sat on my bookshelves just patiently waiting to be read and I thought that this may be the perfect opportunity to finally delve into them. His father, Francis, estranged from his mother, is a set builder for the show in Leeds, and promises Daniel a studio visit. It is all the little touches of mundanity within the drama of the narrative that keep it believable. The plot of The Artifex parallels Daniel’s journey, a device that might seem trite in less skilled hands, but here the elements are balanced perfectly.Still, when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every step forward I try to make. I really enjoyed both of Benjamin Wood’s previous two novels The Bellwether Revivals and The Ecliptic, but I think this is his best work yet. Until that dismal week in August, when every plan he made was an attempt to cancel every word he spoke was a version or lie, I believed my father was a good man, someone whose blood was fit to share. The gentle, steady incline up the tension stakes was tempered with vulnerability and behind this is the allure of those earlier words.

There’s a bit of heavy-handed retrospection as they drive away: “That was the last time I saw her,” Daniel tells us, narrating from the future.He excels at writing with the voice of a twelve year old boy, and the book is tense and chilling throughout, with just the right amount of foreshadowing.

His mother prepares him for disappointment, telling him that “ your father does whatever suits him…. The prose is powerful and masterfully paced, the characters are real, and the author manages to bridge the gap between writing a harrowing thriller and a subtle inward-diving tale. Remarkably, his masterly handling of suspense (menacing revelations ratchet up relentlessly) is linked to a sensitive treatment of emotion, especially about parental betrayal and the long-term aftershocks of loss . His parents marriage is obviously broken and as a 12 year old, he is trying to reach out for the love of his father.

an impressive exercise in mood and narrative command, with a freezing chill that takes some time to depart from the mind.