There are so many books I want to read yet I am always keen to try something new. So I agreed to be involved in Brave New Reads, an initiative of this region's library service.

This book perhaps isn't a good recommendation for the process.

It had an interesting cover; quite commercial with a black and white high rise city scene and a small figure in red in the foreground. Translated from the Chinese, the author is much lauded.

But this is an unsettling, unpleasant and distasteful read. Yet, on finishing it, I felt I had to concede that it was a good book, and the fact that it is written by a former policeman lends terrifying weight to the story.

It is about a teenage boy who plots to kill his one friend and then go on the run. The description of the murder is graphic and horrifying.

When the boy is finally caught, his mother sells everything she has to employ a good lawyer and bribe the murdered girl's mother.

The blurb refers to echoes of Kafka, Camus and Dostoevsky and its comments on Chinese society. Reviews highlight that the motivation for the murder was boredom and that this is a powerful presentation of the mind of a psychopath. All this was beyond me in my superficial reading, and not anything I particularly wanted to explore. Strangely, though, if I had the time, I might actually return to the book to see if I could appreciate it better. But on this reading I felt disturbed and sickened.