A seventeen-year-old boy sits opposite a man on a train. No weapon is drawn. No threat is made. Yet by the time Tom Snelling reaches his destination, he has chosen his victim — and begun one of the most methodical, devastating crimes in recent crime fiction.
Steve McInnes is a coal broker. He is also, in Tom’s eyes, guilty of crimes against the planet. The punishment Tom devises is meticulous and merciless: fabricated evidence, planted images, a reputation dismantled file by file. Steve will be arrested, tried in the court of public opinion, and destroyed — for things he didn’t do.
The Boy on the Train is a crime novel of unsettling moral precision. It asks who the criminal really is, whether a just motive can excuse a monstrous method, and how completely one person can erase another’s life without ever leaving a fingerprint. In Tom Snelling, Martin Goodman has created one of crime fiction’s most chilling and compelling perpetrators — a boy who believes, utterly, that he is the good guy.
