ANDREW FFRENCH joins Robert Goddard’s latest protagonist for a European thriller in our latest Book of the Month, Found Wanting.

THE BOOK: LIKE most intriguing Robert Goddard novels, Found Wanting features a middle-aged anti-hero who is going through a mid-life crisis.

I loved Brighton-based Play to the End, Goddard’s theatrical yarn from 2004, but there have been other novels, including Scottish story Never Go Back in 2006, which I felt didn’t quite hit the mark.

Some Goddard fans prefer his novels to be based in the UK, but Found Wanting takes them out of their comfort zone and much further afield.

I particularly enjoyed the frantic pace at the start of Found Wanting, and in Richard Eusden, Goddard provides a believable protagonist for his slightly far-fetched tale.

The 50-year-old is working for the Foreign Office, wondering where his life took a wrong turn, and also wondering why he is still working in a slightly boring job as a civil servant. But he doesn’t stay bored for long.

One winter’s morning as he walks towards his office in central London, a car skids to a halt alongside him.

The driver is his ex-wife Gemma and, although they have not spoken for years, she has a rather large favour to ask him.

Gemma wants Eusden to contact her other ex-husband Marty Hewitson, who is now dying from a brain tumour, and pass on an old briefcase to him.

Eusden reluctantly agrees to transport the case to school friend Marty in Europe and books the day off work.

But the supposedly simple journey becomes increasingly complicated, and Eusden soon finds himself travelling across Belgium, Germany and Denmark.

It turns out that the weather-beaten briefcase once belonged to Marty’s grandfather Clem Hewitson, an Isle of Wight police officer.

The back story of the Hewitson family is then linked with the tragic fate of the Russian Royal Family the Romanovs, who were murdered following the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Eusden discovers that he can’t trust anyone, not even his old friend Marty, in his conflict with those who are determined to steal the “secret” they believe he and Marty possess.

The reader is taken on a lightning tour of Europe and given a swift resumé of the history of the Romanovs along the way.

It isn’t too long before Anastasia, the child once thought to have survived the Romanov massacre, gets a mention.

Some critics say Goddard writes his novels to a set formula, and in Found Wanting a scandal from the past does inevitably turn up to upset the present. But I think the formula is a winning one and I always look forward to the author’s latest thriller.

l Found Wanting, published in paperback by Corgi Books, price £6.99, is already in the bestseller lists.

THE AUTHOR: Robert Goddard is a seasoned veteran in the world of thriller writing – his first novel Past Caring was published in 1986.

The story was an instant bestseller and since then his books have gripped readers worldwide with their fast pace, tricky plotting and detailed historical backgrounds.

The author’s first Harry Barnett novel, Into the Blue, published in 1990, was winner of the first WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award and was dramatised for TV, starring John Thaw.

It is understood that the author was not particularly impressed with the adaptation and hoped future adaptations would more accurately reflect the novels.

In 1997, Mr Goddard’s novel Beyond Recall was nominated for the Edgar Award Best Novel prize but did not win the prize.

Found Wanting, first published last year, was Goddard’s 20th novel to date.

He was born in Hampshire and read history at Cambridge University. He tried journalism and teaching and worked as an education administrator before becoming a novelist full-time. He lives with his wife in Cornwall.