But there was something else in her gaze, something that I have never been able to identify, which left me unsettled then, and still to this day. A look that has haunted my worst nightmares and darkest hours. Almost as if God himself had peered through a crack in the brittle shell of my mortality to pass his judgment upon me ahead of the grave.

It’s not often I encounter a book that’s not only different from what I expected it to be, but wonderfully different. I expected Peter May’s Runaway to be yet another Baby Boomer paeon to the “glories” of the Swinging 60s. It is no such thing. Far from it.

Jack Mackay is a resident of Edinburgh, a man dwindling into old age. He has been edged out of his house by his daughter’s family and installed in a nursing home. He’s consumed with regrets over an unsuccessful life, over sins committed, dreams unfulfilled, and opportunities thrown away.

Then he’s summoned by an old friend, Maurice Cohen, who was lead singer of the band they were in together in their teens. In 1965, aged 17, they “ran away” to London, to be rock stars like the Beatles. Instead they experienced violence, victimization, and a peripheral connection with a famous celebrity murder.

Maurie is in the terminal stages of cancer now; not much time left. He shows Jack a newspaper story, telling how the man accused of the celebrity murder, who disappeared at the time, has now been found murdered. Maurie says the man was not guilty. He himself knows who did it, and they have an obligation to go to London and set things right.

It sounds insane, but Maurie doesn’t have much time left, and Jack feels a personal debt. They collect Dave, one of the other surviving band members, and dragoon Jack’s couch potato grandson, Ricky, into driving them. They set off on a ridiculous, ill-planned pilgrimage, retracing the route of their ridiculous, ill-planned “escape” 50 years before. Along the way we follow two parallel accounts – Jack’s own first-person memoir of the original trip, and a third-person account of their present 2015 journey. We will learn the source of Jack’s guilt, and the secret Maurie has been hoarding all these years, leading up to an explosive conclusion.

 I have no idea what Peter May believes. I suspect that, like most sensible modern people, he probably wouldn’t care much for my beliefs. But I have to say that I have rarely encountered a better description of sin and guilt – from the human point of view – than I found in Runaway. It amazed and moved me.

This is no CBA novel. Cautions for very adult themes. But I highly recommend Runaway to adult readers.