I’ve been following Alex Smith’s exciting Robbie Kett thriller series. Book Three, Three Little Pigs, rounds out a narrative cycle in the series.

My review of the first book was, in retrospect, conspicuously lacking in perception. I described the book as psychologically extreme, rather than physically extreme. The second book proved me wrong, in spades, and Three Little Pigs takes it even further. Hero DCI Kett doesn’t actually pull needles out of his arm and stagger out of an ICU unit (as so many thriller heroes are wont to do), but that’s about the only extreme he doesn’t go to in this excruciatingly suspenseful story.

As you may recall, Robbie Kett is a London Metropolitan police detective who was dispatched to the more bucolic city of Norwich after his wife Billie was forcibly abducted and disappeared without a trace, five months back. Robbie had been obsessing over the investigation, and his superiors thought it would be best to get him away and let cooler heads look for her. However, he’s seen plenty of action in Norwich – he’s still healing up from wounds he sustained two books ago, not to mention the ones from the second book.

Then a call comes from London. A woman has been found in a weird, abandoned house that seems to have been set up for cult practices. She’s still in shock in the hospital and not talking, but it looks as if they have a real lead now. Robbie is back in London like a shot. His orders are clear – he can observe, but isn’t to interfere with the investigators. As if that’s going to happen.

As Robbie plunges into things, he’s surprised to find clues where no one has before. Granted, he goes to extremes nobody else will, but it almost looks as if the others weren’t really trying. As he functions as a loose cannon in the investigation, earning repeated reprimands and finally house arrest, he begins to dimly glimpse how big the forces involved here are, and to realize there’s nobody he can trust. Nobody at all.

This book nearly killed me as a reader. The stakes started high and kept rising. What looked like a major resolution toward the end turned out to be only the start of new horrors. Three Little Pigs is a page-turner, without a doubt. As is common in such stories, a certain lack of plot logic hardly counts.

Recommended, if you can handle the tension. Cautions for language and serious perversity.