Tariq Ashkanani (2025) The Midnight King.

Tariq Ashkanani threw me. I learned his novel The Midnight King had won Bloody Scotland’s main prize. It used to be called the McIlvanney prize. Named after the author of Laidlaw. A Glasgow detective that set out not just to solve crime, but solve the world. Most of us remember Taggert. Most of us have been in drafted in as extras in the dour, detective drama. Which is a long-winded way of saying, The Midnight King isnae even in fucking Glasgow.

The Midnight King begins at the end. Great hook. ‘Authors Note’.

‘During the fourteen-year period from August 1994 until May 2008, thirteen children were reported missing from Davidson County and the greater Nashville metropolitan area. Thirteen children  would later be discovered dead. Their bodies wrapped in black garbage bags.’

Lucas Cole is a prolific author, who wrote under the pseudonym, Jack Cross. He admits to also being a serial killer. These thirteen children were his victims.

Case closed.

His son Nathan visits the tacky hotel where his father hung himself.  He feels complicit in those murders as was his elder sister. He ran away. She stayed. They knew the victims. Their dad brought them home. But they couldn’t tell anyone. Mea culpa.

Case closed.

Only a childhood friend of Nathan and his sister, Issac, is on a case. Little Chloe Xi. Well, he’s no longer a cop but a private investigator now. He had to leave the force after he beat a suspect to pulp. Just another paedophile, holding out on him, when the clock was ticking.

Issac, like Nathan, and his sister, is damaged goods. There’s that mirroring throughout the novel.

The clock is still ticking. Lucas Cole, The Midnight King, is dead. A patsy is ready to go to the electric chair, framed for his crimes by a police force unable to get a handle on his crimes and a media barrage demanding answers, vengeance dressed as state restitution. Nobody mourns the murder of serial killers.

Chloe Xi is still missing. Still missing. That meant Lucas Cole took her. Or somebody is copycatting his methods. Somebody close. The Midnight King is dead? Long live the new Midnight King?

Tick, tick, tick, Read on.   

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6