While on the whole I liked this book, there were plenty of times while reading it when I felt that things weren’t gelling right. Plot elements – crucial ones – were introduced too late or in a slipshod way. The story felt haphazard and sometimes stumbled over itself. We spent perhaps too much time getting to know about the main character Cameron’s (a slacker Scottish newspaper writer) penchant for speed and video games than we did moving ahead with the meat of the story.

But as a horror novel, Complicity does, in the end, come through. Its underlying theme of helplessness in the face of utter human greed and immorality, and how to respond to that effectively, plus the grotesque but imaginative murder scenes, drew me in and made me at least a little sympathetic toward the killer when the identity is revealed midway through. And the ending is oddly satisfying, if full of question marks.