This is Xander Shute: once a wealthy banker, now living on the streets.
As he shelters for the night in an empty Mayfair flat, he hears its occupants returning home, and scrambles to hide as the couple argue. Trapped in his hiding place, he soon finds himself witnessing a vicious murder.
But who was the dead woman, who the police later tell him can’t have been there? And why is the man Xander saw her with evading justice?
As Xander searches for answers, his memory of the crime comes under scrutiny, forcing him to confront his long-buried past and the stories he’s told about himself.
How much he is willing to risk to understand the brutal truth?
I have had Imran Mahmood’s debut novel YOU DON’T KNOW ME on my To Be Read pile since it came out, in both ebook and audiobook, and have not got found to reading it yet. Having finished his second novel I KNOW WHAT I SAW, I have no idea what I was thinking - Mahmood has just moved closer to the top of the list.
I KNOW WHAT I SAW is a thriller which pulls you in from the first scene and doesn’t let go until the stunning conclusion. Set over a couple of weeks, the novel is narrated by Xander Shute, a homeless man, once a successful banker, now living on the streets of London. Taking shelter in a seemingly empty Mayfair apartment, Xander witnesses the apparent murder of a woman by her lover. Feeling guilty that he did nothing to prevent the crime, Xander reports the murder to the local police giving a detailed description of the flat and what little he saw of the couple. The police investigation reveals no body, no signs of a struggle, and the photos of the scene do not match the details of Xander’s recollection.
Xander Shute is an incredibly well-drawn character, a man on the streets, seemingly by choice, plagued with memory issues, possibly a liar, certainly an unreliable narrator. The more Xander tries to convince himself, and the reader, of what he saw, the more doubt creeps in. As he recalls his former life, his friends, his girlfriend, his brother, and, particularly, the latter’s death, the more pieces fall into place, the less likely it seems that Xander could have witnessed the crime he maintains he saw, the less likely things could have happened as he recounts them. When it becomes apparent that former friends recall events differently from Xander, the mistrust of him as a narrator grows. But, is Xander wilfully misleading the reader, could he in fact be guilty of some crime, perhaps even murder, himself?
Imran Mahmood weaves an intricate web from which it is impossible to unravel the truth. Xander is a sympathetic storyteller, and Mahmood makes us really empathise with his narrator’s life on the street. I imagine many of us are guilty of avoiding the homeless, passing by ‘beggars’ without taking the time to wonder how they got to this point. Do they, like Xander, divide the city into ‘zones’ of safety and peril? Have they experienced some tragedy from which running away seemed to be the only choice? I KNOW WHAT I SAW has certainly made me think and, I hope, I will not simply walk past in future.
Thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers @Tr4cyF3nt0n, Bloomsbury Raven Books @BloomsburyRaven and, of course, Imran Mahmood @imranmahmood777
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