Something You Are — Hanna Jameson

Nic Cuaruana is 27, and he has served a prison sentence for killing someone when he was 17. Since his release, he has worked as a hit man-cum-cleaner-upper of various crime problems. An arms dealer called Pat employs Nic to find his missing teenage daughter Emma, and almost before he knows it Nic has fallen big-time into gangland London. Quickly he discovers Emma has been murdered, but as he keeps chipping away as to what happened to her, Nic upsets more and more of the sort of people who really shouldn’t be upset and, even more dangerously, he starts to fall for the nervy charms of Pat’s self-mutilating wife, Clare. Taut, spare, and brilliantly plotted, Something You Are is the first in a series of menacing urban crime novels from a young female writer of exceptional talent.