The lost: Firearms Officer Jonah Colley #1

I found The lost at my local library and was intrigued after reading the blurb. I hadn't heard of author, Simon Beckett, prior to starting on his Dr Hunter series. Beckett has published eight books to date, with The lost the first of a new series, and the other seven part of his highly-successful forensic anthropologist series featuring Dr David Hunter. Read here for my review of two of the Dr Hunter books.

The book I read and have reviewed here is the first and currently only Jonah Colley book. Colley is a police officer with the London metropolitan firearms unit, SCO19.

Simon Beckett has had an interesting journey into writing, first working in property maintenance and then as a teacher in Spain and later as a percussionist in a band. Beckett has been a freelance journalist since 1992, writing for The Times, The Independent, and The Observer. Apparently Beckett visited The Body Farm in Tennessee in 2002 while on assignment for an article on the National Forensic Academy. This experience was his inspiration for the David Hunter books.

The lost | Published November 2021 | Read December 2024

We meet Jonah Colley in The lost after he answers a call from an old friend and colleague, DS Gavin McKinney, who sounds scared as he begs for Jonah's help. This plea leads Jonah, against his better judgement, to an abandoned warehouse known as Slaughter Quay. There he discovers four bodies, brutally tortured and murdered, including Gavin's. Jonah is beaten to within an inch of his life before his attacker runs off.

Jonah then falls under suspicion for the murders by the investigating team. While he recovers from a debilitating knee injury sustained at Slaughter Quay, Jonah tries to piece everything together and avoid being sent to jail. This journey takes Jonah back ten years to when his four-year-old son, Theo, went missing from a park one morning. Jonah, who was coming straight off night shift, briefly fell asleep while watching him. Theo has never been found and the aftermath of his disappearance caused not only lingering trauma for Jonah, who bore the brunt of the blame, but also the break up of his marriage to Chrissie, Theo's mother.

I devoured The lost quickly as I was super keen to find out what happened. The book becomes more intriguing as links emerge between the Slaughter Quay case and Theo's disappearance ten years earlier. In true British crime style, The lost is brutal and disturbing and a bit uncomfortable to read at times, but not overly gratuitous. Beckett's well-paced and suspenseful writing connected me to the story from the outset even though I felt a bit bogged down in the middle part with all the action. Jonah is constantly under suspicion, even with little evidence to link him to the murders, and this felt a bit overdone.

All the central players are well fleshed out, but I had some issues with Jonah's characterisation. I get that he is still grieving for his son and Beckett wants the reader to see him as A Good Guy. That said, given his police background, Jonah seemed to make some silly decisions throughout the story. This odd decision-making frustrated me a bit: Jonah is an engaging and believable character, yet I kept vacillating between thinking he is a bit dim and seeing the good in him. There's also a lot of stuff in the book that's unrealistic, mostly Jonah doing a bunch of bad ass stuff with a busted knee not long out of surgery. I also felt that the lead detective was bordering on a caricature, dead set on trying to pin everything on Jonah, taking everything at face value and failing to properly investigate the case.

All that aside, I'm here for future Jonah Colley books. I'd like to keep reading the David Hunter series, too, as I am fascinated by forensic anthropology. These books have received good reviews and I'm down a series on forensic anthropology after finally deciding to ditch the Tempe Brennan books by Kathy Reichs😏.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐