A Line of Blood
You find your neighbour dead in his bath.
Your son is with you. He sees everything.
You discover your wife has been in the man’s house.
It seems she knew him.
Now the police need to speak to you.
One night turns Alex Mercer’s life upside down. He loves his family and he wants to protect them, but there is too much he doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know how the cracks in his and Millicent’s marriage have affected their son, Max. Or how Millicent’s bracelet came to be under the neighbour’s bed. He doesn’t know how to be a father to Max when his own world is shattering into pieces.
Then the murder investigation begins…
Reviews
A tense, touching, smartly written thriller with a very clever twist. McPherson is an impressive new voice.
Ben McPherson has a very distinctive voice, and A LINE OF BLOOD is cleverly put together
A hugely impressive debut, well written and psychologically acute; a devastating depiction of a family tearing itself apart
A LINE OF BLOOD caught my attention from its remarkable opening and gripped me to the end. It is about real things and the foundations of its suspense are genuine. What I admire most is the depth and wisdom of Ben’s examination of the complexity of love and anger, hatred and revenge. It is both an extraordinary novel and thriller, and brilliantly written.
McPherson displays a rare skill for creating characters with depth in a world that is splintering around them.
[A]n impressive slice of domestic suspense...McPherson is a dab hand at creating realistically flawed characters.
Ben McPherson drew me into the life of an ordinary family and gave me a ringside seat to watch the fracturing of those relationships beneath the weight of a murder investigation. Gripping from the get-go, A Line of Blood will have readers wondering what they might be capable of in the face of the terrible isolation of self within a family running off the rails.
Many good novels pose the question: how should you act in certain circumstances? This is the question McPherson puts, and the answer that he finds for his characters seems to be admirable and yet morally dubious. This is how it should be.
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