The blurb on the back of Midnight Cab makes a brave – or possibly suicidal – claim that aspects of this mystery are “worthy of Thomas Harris.” The surprise is that the comparison is not just standard operating hype. James Nichol has a clear, propulsive style – Midnight Cab’s chapters gain suspense and force like the literary equivalent of a shot of vodka. Fans of Harris’s Hannibal Lecter trilogy will also savour Nichol’s ghastly psycho of a villain, and the way villain’s operatic depravity synchronizes with the conventions of the successful mystery novel.

At the age of three Walker Devereaux was found clinging to a wire fence by the side of a country road with nothing but a blurred memory of a frightened, dark-haired mother and the red-faced man who drove her away. Sixteen years later, Walker hits the mean streets of Toronto looking for some answers about his background. He acquires a job as a cab driver, an apartment, and a soulmate, all the while pursuing a single clue to his identity: an old inscribed snapshot of girls at a lakeside beach. Walker’s search forms the bulk of the novel. Nichol also furnishes readers with a parallel narrative concerning another fateful boy who grows up to become not a seeker but a dealer in cruel fate.

Midnight Cab makes for fine entertainment, but it falls short of the velvety pinnacles of the Harris classics. Readers will be incredulous that Walker finds an apartment in Toronto so easily, and that his job at the taxi firm turns out to be stuffed with colourful characters.

The key problem, though, is Nichol’s depiction of hard-knocked, small-town kid Walker – a bruised boy like this should have a wounded, rock-and-roll aura around him. Instead, he tends to think and act like Nichol himself, an established CBC Radio dramatist. In other words, Midnight Cab makes for a wild ride, even though the prematurely middle-aged kid at the wheel opts to put on a Tina Turner tape along the way.