By Patrick McGuinness (Vintage Publishing 2019):

Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the murder of Bristol landscape gardener Joanna Yeates will be familiar with the plot of Throw Me to the Wolves.

Names and locations have been changed, but there’s no disguising the fact that the accused – Michael Wolphram – very closely resembles Christopher Jeffries, the man initially suspected of Joanna’s murder.

That may come as no surprise – Jeffries was one of McGuinness’s teachers when he was at school which explains his interest in the case.

Former English teacher Jeffries was later found to be innocent – but not before a national media monstering had destroyed his reputation, guilty only of being a little eccentric.

Oddball Wolphram suffers the same fate, accused of the murder of neighbour Zalie Dyer despite a lack of any evidence, and we are taken on a journey back in time to his days teaching at Chapleton College.

Through the eyes of former pupil Ander, we experience the bullying and beasting of boys at the boarding school. Ander admits that Wolphram, unlike some other teachers, was not in the habit of assaulting pupils.

This is significant because it is Ander who, now a police officer, is leading the investigation into Zalie’s murder.

Many readers will know Jeffries was cleared. They will know Joanna was killed by neighbour Vincent Tabak. In less skilful hands, this would sound a death knell for this story. We know the outcome from the very beginning. We can see the plot twist coming 300 pages before it appears.

That we keep reading, despite this, is testament to the ability of McGuinness to produce a clever, powerful and, yes, highly entertaining alternative take on the tragic events.

Our narrator, straight-man Ander, runs the police investigation and, in parallel, we learn about his life as a young Dutch boy growing up in the sometimes brutal British public school system. He, too, was an outsider and a loner. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Ander’s gets the perfect comedy sidekick in Gary, an unreconstructed Mondeo man, who hides his intellect beneath a barrage of witty one-liners.

‘We weren’t taught by men who thought Childline was a home delivery service,’ says Gary, defending his comprehensive school education. When checking a dating website for suspects he stumbles across a man describing himself as ‘husky, dusky and musky’, which, says Gary, sounds like Snow White’s three sex-offender dwarves.

In a single sentence McGuinness takes us all back to our school days. ‘The classroom smells of cheap floor polish, overapplied deodorant and badly wiped arse. Bottle that and you’d have a whole country’s 1980s in the form of a spray.’

Journalist Lynne Forester is cast as the pantomime villain, selling untrue stories, gossip and hearsay to the national media, sating its feeding frenzy by throwing our prime suspect to the tabloid wolves.

Throughout, we are kept informed of the progress of attempts to clear an oozing fatberg wedged in the local sewers. This could be seen as a metaphor for the investigation, cutting through all the filth that had accumulated over the years.

It is an impressive and entertaining story that McGuinness has created. I’m sure Christopher Jefferies would approve of his former pupil’s work.