The Murderer's Son

A woman is stabbed to death in her kitchen on the edge of the Lincolnshire Fens. Days later, Daniel Kinder walks into Saltern police station and confesses. DI Rowan Jackman and DS Marie Evans should have their case, except that Daniel cannot produce a single fact only the killer would know.

Daniel believes he is the son of Francis Thayer, a murderess who butchered a farmer and his wife twenty years ago, and he suffers fugue states in which he has no idea what he does. He is not confessing to what he remembers. He is confessing to what he assumes about himself.

With nothing to hold him on, Jackman and Evans have to let him walk, and then he vanishes, and the killings continue. Joy Ellis's first Jackman and Evans novel is a bleak, fast British police procedural, its dread drawn as much from the flat, water-logged Fens as from the question of whether the man who wants to be guilty actually is.