Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Mercy Lake is a 'night person', an outsider obsessed with the lives of her neighbours. She sees it as her mission to help them, secretly, with the troubles in their lives through little acts of kindness.
A seemingly chance meeting with the mysterious Louis offers a change of direction. What if fear could do more to right wrongs than kindness? Joining forces, they take ever more direct action, drawing closer each time to going too far.
Sam Lloyd's latest novel imagines what might happen when a good Samaritan goes bad, asking questions about how far any of us would go to do what we thought was right. Things are made that little bit more unsettling by the set-up of a ‘quirky’ outsider watching and intervening in the lives of her neighbours being something that could have been lifted from the sort of novel that has a lot of pastel colours on its cover. Here though things are taken into altogether darker territory.
Mercy Lake is a brilliantly off-kilter central character, someone who inhabits a reality at right angles to everyone around. Driven by a moral compass that has been magnetised by half remembered events from her past she makes for a perfectly imperfect avenging angel.
This is Sam Lloyd’s third novel, though the plotting and characterisation show the sure touch of a veteran. This marks him out as one of the authors to watch over the next few years.
