The prime joy of reading crime fiction is puzzling out “who dunnit”. Yet here’s a thriller in which we know who the guilty parties are almost from the get go.

And yet we are still happy to go along for the ride. Wondering where this horror journey can possibly end – and how many victims will suffer a bloody and pointless death.

It’s akin to making tentative  and wary steps towards the ticket kiosk for the roller-coaster  only to stagger off at the end of the ride, exhilarated and yelling “wouldn’t have missed that for quids” as we wait for the white knuckles to regain their normal hue.

Admittedly there were moments during  All Of Us Are Broken when the temptation was to call a halt and seek my thrills elsewhere in the to-be-read pile.  For me, it contained too many detours; too many digressions that strained for writerly effect in contrast to the style of the main narrative.

There was an excess of prose to contend with when author Fiona Cummins strayed from the main course of her narrative.  It was as if she thought a breather was needed from the headlong pace of the story.

After all, even Formula One drivers need a pit stop.

Thus we are given minutely descriptive – even educational – interludes to help us draw breath as we hurtle from an almost idyllic family home in rural Essex  to the explosive finale in the ballroom of a remote upmarket Scottish hotel.

The story centres on two twenty-something psychopaths, chillingly unfazed about the heinous deeds they commit and the inevitable fate they face.  Their death-wish duet  is mired in brutality. Their ghastly deeds show total disregard for their victims, regardless of their age or circumstances.

These are two stone-cold emotionless creatures creating carnage that lacks any rhyme or reason to those who suffer at their hands. As well as to those charged with putting an end to their trail of blood lust.

They are  among the most joyless and unloveable characters to blight recent crime fiction.

No excuses, nothing to be said in mitigation.

Extreme in everything they think and do; revelling in an excess of thoughtless cruelty. It is hard to imagine  such mindless cruelty living among us.

Yet the day this review was being written the press carried a story about a fourteen-year-old girl who stabbed two teachers and a fellow pupil and commented that this was one way to get herself known.

“More eyes will be looking at me,” she reportedly said. “That’s one way to be a celebrity.”

In All Of Us Are Broken a schoolroom is also the initial setting. But here it is a probationary teacher, Melissa Smith, who seeks fame through causing random deaths. It is a teenage student  and a classroom fight that sparks her subsequent trail of terror. Her willing accomplice is Dashiell Lloyd, known as Fox, a convicted killer when only fourteen and now a heavily armed car thief.

Frighteningly, the words quoted above were almost the same as author Cummins puts into the mouth of  her murderous tearaway. Her fiction,  created well before the acts now being reported, became reality as I  succumbed to the awful  tale unfolding on the page.

Although it is another book in which Cummins makes Detective Constable Saul Anguish (a most appropiate name) her hero crime solver, he is given a fairly low key role. His appearances are spasmodic for one alloted such a cental and climatic part.

Even stranger is his blue-haired sidekick, Doctor Clover March – unoriginally known as Blue.  Justification for the presence amid the random gore of this “talented forensic linguist” with more than her fair share of baggage and character quirks is hard to fathom. Especially as she suffers from narcolepsy; falling asleep on the job is not a good look.

One wonders about the Major Crime Unit that leaves this strange pairing to take over the nationwide pursuit of the killers.

Especially as Anguish (who lives in a coastguard’s lookout) has another detective constable as his immediate boss.

Yet despite all these imponderables and contrivances, Cummins manages to dangle an irresistable lure as the kill count increases and she ramps up the pace and frequency of their crimes.

The finale has us sharing a mother’s nail-biting dilemma – which one of her two children should die to allow herself and her other child to survive?

Thus it eventually becomes a page-turner of a book – but it is a helluva journey to get there.

And I am still wondering why I stayed the course.