Well, that was some book. And for once it lived up to all the hype and praise highlighted on its covers and frontispiece.

Having earlier devoured the superb The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and now looking forward to the much-praised stage version in a few months time), I have been even more captivated, intrigued and thoroughly absorbed by Rubbernecker (Black Swan Books) by Belinda Bauer.

Little wonder that it won her the Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award for 2014. It’s a stunner.

Like The Curious Incident, its main protagonist is a young person with autism or Asperger’s (no one is quite sure which) who weaves his way almost nonchalantly through a minefield of pitfalls, setbacks, disasters, assaults and insults as he doggedly unravels a mystery that all around him either refuse to acknowledge exists, or are attempting to hide.

All he wants to know is the truth. Seemingly such a simple quest for one with what might be termed a “simple” mind. But, as we all know, the world is full of liars, ditherers, spin doctors, prevaricators, distorters and cover-up merchants to whom the truth is something to be twisted and denied.

Bauer provides a master-class in piling mystery upon mystery as her anti hero, the perpetually bemused Patrick, doggedly seeks the answers to his father’s death and that of a man whose body he has to dissect as he studies the intricacies of anatomy. She gathers numerous threads, each seemingly loose and disconnected, and gradually weaves them into a neat and highly credible solution. But the route she takes is tortuous and tantalising.

It is a stunner of a book that steps well beyond the usual borders of the mystery/detection genre yet remains a thriller, astonishing in its plotting and beautifully crafted in its writing.

Bauer has already won the CWA Golden Dagger award for Crime Novel of the Year with her first book, Blacklands, and Rubbernecker suggests there are many more accolades to come. Can’t get enough of her.