Blue Monday: Inside the minds of London's dark side

Blue Monday is the first in a series of eight crime thrillers to star Frieda Klein, a psychoanalyst drawn to the dark side of London by the patients she treats. There is a mysterious side to the trench coat-wearing doctor. She's an insomniac who walks the city at 3am, losing herself in "the oddity of the creatures who come out". She refuses to carry a mobile phone. When she needs to concentrate, she draws inanimate objects and is often simultaneously struck by ingenious thoughts. In Blue Monday, Frieda becomes distressed as she listens to a patient reveal his hunger for a small redheaded boy. The description is an eerie fit to five-year-old Matthew Faraday, whose recent abduction has caused a media frenzy and left police baffled. She shares her hunch with the detective chief inspector leading the investigation, but he brushes her off as a time waster. Neither of them has any way of knowing at this point that Frieda has stumbled into the mind of a most cunning psychopath. As the plot twists and turns, the intensity builds. A glimmer of hope dangles like a carrot, or a bag of lemon sherbet and jelly babies. From / The National