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.

In London in 2015, an old man who has been a fugitive for many years is murdered. In Glasgow, Jack Mackay, a retiree, is summoned by his old friend Maurie, who is dying of cancer. Maurie makes a request, or more of a demand. The murdered man did not do the crime everyone thinks he did. For that reason, Jack must get the old band together, and they must take Maurie to London before he dies. That’s the premise of Runaway, by Peter May.

It’s a crazy request, but Jack is at loose ends in his life and has nothing better to do. Also, he’s curious. Fifty years ago, the friends were in a rock band, and they all ran off on impulse, to find fame and riches in London. What happened was traumatic, and left Jack with many unresolved questions that still haunt him.

Soon the old men are on the road, in a “borrowed” car, with Jack’s couch potato grandson dragooned into driving. As they follow the route they traveled half a century earlier, the reader follows Jack’s recollections of the original journey, the central event and great tragedy of all their lives.

I was uncomfortable with this book at first. I feared it would be yet another celebration of the glories of the Love Generation, with its supposed idealism and courage. But what the band encounters in this story is much closer to the actual truth – passions running riot, drugged confusion, and cynical predation by exploiters. Jack is victimized, and victimizes others himself, to his eternal regret.

It’s a sad story, but insightful, and – in the view of this survivor of the era – pretty authentic. I also ought to mention that on one particular social issue – I won’t spoil it for you – it takes exactly the right side.

This wasn’t an easy novel for me to read, but in the end I found it rewarding and enriching. Cautions for language, sexual situations, and disturbing content.