The debut novel from Montreal writer Robert Pobi begins with a classic trope of literary fiction: a middle-aged man returns home to care for his aging father, now suffering from Alzheimer’s. For Jake Cole, that home is a textbook modernist house overlooking the Atlantic just outside of Montauk. His father, celebrated painter Jacob Coleridge, has accidentally set himself on fire, destroying his hands and prompting Jake’s return, almost three decades after his acrimonious departure.

The literary trappings dissolve with the ringing of Jake’s cell phone: two murder victims, a mother and son, have been found, skinned alive, and the local police are looking for assistance from Jake, an FBI consultant with an eidetic memory and a knack for understanding crime scenes that seems almost supernatural to onlookers.

When a third victim is found – a nurse who bears a resemblance to Jake’s mother, who was murdered in the 1970s (also, as it happens, skinned alive) – it begins to seem that the serial killings are connected to Jake and his father. Jake must not only pursue the killer but also try to protect the people close to him, including the father he no longer loves and the wife and son to whom he is devoted. To further complicate matters, the largest hurricane in almost a century is about to make landfall at Montauk.

In many ways, Bloodman appears to be a textbook serial-killer thriller: Jake is the troubled hero with a shady past. There’s friction between him and the local police, and his skill with analyzing crime scenes will remind the reader of … well, just about every other detective in a serial-killer thriller.

The book is further hampered, at least in its early stages, by writing that is by turns clunky and graceless. Clues are telegraphed with the subtlety of flashing neon signs, and the relationships between the characters are ham-handed and cross well over into cliché. These early pages creak and groan.

However, the book coalesces in its second half, and the result is a mind-shredding, heartbreaking read. As the storm hits, the plot twists and feeds back on itself, pieces falling together in patterns that are genuinely shocking, despite being hinted at throughout. Notwithstanding its weak first half, Bloodman ends up as a most impressive work, one that will linger, if not haunt outright.