White Rabbit, Red Wolf by Tom Pollock

Book of the Week: 17 June 2018

The first chapter sees Pete Blankman crouching in a corner of the larder having eaten practically everything in the kitchen. He has run out of food, so has tried the contents of the salt cellar, reducing it to shards of porcelain. Pete is a mathematical prodigy who suffers extreme and incapacitating anxiety attacks. His mother, in a brisk, no-nonsense way, tries to help him cope but the person he truly feels connected to is his twin sister Bel, who he regularly calls his ‘axiom’. The salt cellar incident has been triggered by the fact that Pete is expected to attend an award ceremony at the Natural History Museum, where his mother, Dr Blankman, will be honoured for her research. As he feared, the occasion sets off one of Pete’s anxiety attacks and he leaves the ceremony and runs through the corridors of the museum with his mother in pursuit. Then he hears her call for help and turns back to find she has been stabbed. Before he has a chance to do anything, his mother’s colleagues have called an ambulance and whisked him away to a residential street in Hackney that turns out to be a cover for a secret service location. He learns that his mother was part of the organisation and that his sister is missing and may have had something to do with the attack.

This is a fast-moving thriller where it is hard to know who to trust. The time-frame flips from the present to several years ago at regular intervals and Pete frequently thinks about situations in mathematical terms. The strong language and violence make it more suited to older readers who enjoy a story with plenty of twists and turns.