The Gravedigger's Story by Ged Simmons (I.M.P. Fiction, £7.99)

MASON is nearing 40, a loner who lives in a bedsit.

He likes drinking beer and whisky and most Sunday nights he bleaches his hair.

Illegitimate, he walked out on his no-good mother when he was 18 and he hasn't seen her since; he doesn't even know if she's still alive.

He's spent the years travelling through Europe, returning to England occasionally to earn money doing menial tasks and from the very first line of this melancholy tale of a deeply troubled childhood that shaped an awkward adult, you know that Mason is going to kill Dadda, his stepfather.

And when he's done that, Mason is going to kill himself.

Here, actor Simmons (best-known for his role as DI Cullen in The Bill) does a splendid job of telling the heart-wrenching story of a life gone so tragically wrong.

Dadda is the only anchor, the only giver of love in Mason's bleak existance.

He was the widower who married Mason's promiscuous Catholic mother when she was a teenager - made pregnant by one of her many boyfriends - in order to save her "good" name.

She repaid him by refusing to consumate their union of convenience and seven years later, walked out on him to live with the first of a string of men.

It is those seven years that Mason goes back to, time and time again. Dadda is the only father Mason has ever known and all his memories of their short time together remain precious.

So what has Dadda done to turn Mason into an avenging angel?

Mason is the gravedigger in his old home town, tending the churchyard and the graves of Dadda's first wife and their baby daughter - the two Lauras. Mason believes Dadda is in Australia, where he emigrated soon after he and his mother left, but he's been living around the corner.

When their lives cross once more, Mason believes that for the very first time, he has a purpose in life.

In spite of - or maybe because of - the subject matter, Simmons keeps the reader dangling until the denouement, pushing all the right buttons to achieve the desired emotional ending.

David Chapman