Blood Relative - Hardcover

"[An] astute psychological thriller... Thomas keeps the chills coming right up to the satisfying conclusion."--Publishers Weekly

"Blood Relative alternates between the present day and East Berlin of the 1970s and '80s. Thomas' research on this dark period of East German history is intense, making for a chilling read and leading to a frightening finale."--Mystery Scene

"That Thomas keeps us intrigued and gently amused is proof of his skill."--The Guardian

"This is the first psychological thriller that Thomas has written under his own name--readers may be familiar with his very successful Tom Cain thrillers--and very good it is too."--Daily Mail

"If his five Tom Cain thrillers are David Thomas' big-budget Bourne movies, this first novel under his own name is his Third Man--dour, ethically complex and written in moody black-and-white."--The Telegraph

"If writing is art, then David Thomas serves up crime in Blood Relative as a pensive chiaroscuro, moody, grey and brooding...Step by step intrigue, Blood Relative spatters itself on the page in a brilliant pool of a novel."--The Review Broads

In this spine-tingling thriller--the dark offspring of The Lives of Others and The Fugitive--an architect races against the clock to clear his wife of his brother's murder.
Architect Peter Crookham is running late for a dinner party with his estranged journalist brother and his gorgeous German wife, Mariana. He enters his home to discover his brother viciously stabbed to death and his wife covered in blood and clutching a knife, in a nearly catatonic state. Refusing to accept that Mariana could be responsible for Andy's death, Peter vows to clear her name.

As he begins to search the past for clues, Peter soon learns that Andy had been looking into Mariana's murky past in Germany, and had even traveled to Berlin to piece together some facts about her childhood. Anxious for answers, Peter retraces his brother's steps in East Berlin--and finds himself caught in a web of intrigue involving violent remnants of the former East German security service, the feared STASI.
With a split narrative that alternates back and forth between Peter's current hunt for the truth and the horrendous realities of life in communist East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, Blood Relative asks the question: How well do we really know the ones we love?