Through the window of his taxi, he watched rain-streaked red sandstone tenements drift past, the colour leeched from them somehow by lack of light, like watching a black-and-white movie of his childhood spool by.

Peter May excels at creating interesting protagonists for his novels. He’s given us another winner (at least for this reader) in John Mackenzie, hero of A Silent Death. Mackenzie is a policeman with issues – highly intelligent but utterly lacking in interpersonal skills. Kind of like Monk, or Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes (in fact, Cumberbatch would be a good casting choice if this book is ever filmed). He made himself unwelcome at the Metropolitan Police, and now works for the National Crime Agency, not a step up career-wise.

It’s as much to get rid of him as anything else that his boss sends him to Spain, to collect a criminal being extradited. Only when he arrives, he finds that the criminal, a murderer and drug dealer named Jack Cleland, has escaped. This fact is of particular, urgent concern to Spanish officer Cristina Sanchez Pradell, who is tasked with meeting and escorting Mackenzie. Jack Cleland blames Cristina for the death of his fiancée, and has vowed to take his revenge on her – by targeting her husband, her son, and her blind-and-deaf-aunt, Ana.

As Mackenzie applies his considerable brain to the problem of where Cleland might be hiding, Cleland kidnaps Ana. Surprisingly, an odd relationship gradually rises between the two outsiders, as Mackenzie also learns a few things about being human from Cristina.

Silent Death was engrossing, poignant and exciting. I rate this book very high. Occasional references to religion are not positive, but are fair from the characters’ point of view.