Tom Shearer Investigates

Tom Shearer is sixty-one, recovering from a stroke, and working in a sub-basement nobody visits. The Cold Case Unit is where the Metropolitan Police puts the files it has given up on, and the officers it hasn't quite given up on yet. For Shearer, it is somewhere to be useful while the clock runs down.

Until he finds three files that shouldn't look alike — and do. Three deaths, three verdicts, three psychiatric assessments written in language so certain, so clean, that no honest clinician could have produced them. And one name at the bottom of each.

What Shearer uncovers, with the help of his formidably perceptive new colleague DS Leila Khan, is not negligence. It is something colder and stranger than that: a psychiatrist who believed he was offering his most damaged patients a transformation, and who accepted the cost of that belief in human lives.

The Threshold moves from a London basement to a quiet Norfolk market town to a Georgian clinic in Marylebone, building a case out of a nurse's twenty-year silence, a fragment of correspondence nobody was meant to find, and a tape recording that cannot be unheard. It is a novel about institutional failure, the abuse of trust, and what it takes — and costs — to keep reading the files everyone else has closed.