Brilliant. The last book in the loosely connected Noir San Francisco trilogy and probably my favourite of the three, The Night Market is creepy and intense, set years after the events of the previous books and throwing us into a world that is the same but also quite quite different.

Beautifully descriptive both in character and setting the San Francisco we find in “The Night Market” has a tangibly different feel to it than before. Carver lives here, is part of the law here and so through him we can see the different nuances and the sense of feeling Mr Moore brings to the narrative is wonderfully absorbing.

From the very first chapters where we, the readers, feel the full impact of what happens to Carver, then watch him haunted by the missing memories, determined to find out the truth, it is utterly gripping and plays on your mind while you are away from it -It never really lets up until that very last page, with its beautifully emotive ending. The theme running through it is scarily authentic, a possible future that is far from beyond the realms of possibility – a thought provoking nightmare journey that Carver takes us on with him.

An unpredictable story told with razor sharp edges and deeply felt impassioned moments, The Night Market cleverly and rather brutally yet beautifully brings an end to this show – With The Poison Artist you get a psychological thriller with a classically layered unreliable narrator, with The Dark Room you get a tense, nail biting police procedural and character drama, with The Night Market you get a speculative dystopian tale and holding all of these together is that city – San Francisco – in all its glory – and the people that live there.

If you’ve not read The Poison Artist or The Dark Room yet then I recommend them – whilst each novel stands on its own, read all together they make a complete work of art.

Highly Recommended

**Review also available on Goodreads**

Detective Ross Carver is on the scene of a murder in a stately home, trying to figure out what the hell is all over his victim. Whatever it is, it appears to be dissolving the man’s skin. Carver is still musing when federal agents storm the house and frog march him to a trailer to be decontaminated where he’s forced to drink a noxious liquid that gives him seizures and then given electrical shocks until he passes out. When he comes to his senses two days later, he’s in his own bed, while his neighbor Mia reads aloud to him. What the hell? He has little memory of what happened before he came to, but Mia tells him he was carried home by two cops who said he’s been poisoned. Thus begins one of the most twisted, puzzling books I’ve read this year. Moore is a master at creating suspense, this book is not be missed