When a young girl is snatched from a West Yorkshire town there are eerie similarities with a cold case from many years earlier. It can’t be the same killer, can it?

1994. Eighteen-year-old Adrian Brown spends his days working at the local newspaper, and his evenings in his local pub. But under this ordinary surface lies a haunting story. Aged ten, Adrian was kidnapped by a shadowy figure known as the Lollipop Man, who had abducted three children before. Adrian was the only one to escape.

When another child goes missing, the media whips up a frenzy that the Lollipop Man has returned. Journalist Sheila Hargreaves, troubled with memories of her involvement in the reporting of the previous abductions, is determined to dig deeper, atone for what she did nearly a decade ago and bring a killer to justice.

The Lollipop Man by Daniel Sellers is a pacy and captivating thriller set in the 1990s. Back in 1986, a serial killer is on the loose in West Yorkshire, named in the papers as ‘The Lollipop Man’ because of the clothing they were seen wearing. The man kidnapped four young children. Three of them were murdered, but their bodies were never discovered; however, one escaped. Then the kidnappings stopped, and the person was never caught.

Fast forward to 1994, and the escaped child, Matthew Spivey, is now eighteen years old and goes by the name Adrian Brown. He is working as a junior journalist at his local paper.

Reports have come in that a young girl has been abducted, and the similarities are eerily close to the events of the 1980s. The locals are in fear once again that the Lollipop Man is back. Can the man be stopped this time, or will he kill more children before going to ground again?

What an emotional rollercoaster The Lollipop Man is. Having grown up in the 1990s in northern England, it was like a walk down memory lane – although with more murders this time. The plot was intriguing and puzzling. Why was a kidnapper/killer back after eight years? Where had he been in that time?

There are a lot of characters to get your head around, and the police are portrayed as pretty useless, leaving most of the work to journalists, including Sheila Hargreaves, who worked on the first cases and now has her own TV chat show. Adrian is quite a complex character as he is both determined and scared, old-headed yet at times comes across as younger than he was. He is likeable, and you can’t help feeling for someone who has been through such a traumatic ordeal.

With plenty of secrets and lies to come out, and many twists in the story, The Lollipop Man had me glued to the pages, eager to unfold all the drama and get to the bottom of the case. I now can’t wait for the next book in the series.

Daniel Sellers is the author of the Kindle-bestselling Lola Harris Mysteries and is an obsessive fan of Agatha Christie. His crime thrillers are pacy and dark, with as much interest in whydunnit as who. He grew up in Yorkshire, and has lived and worked in Liverpool, Glasgow, Ireland and Finland. Sellers now lives in Argyll in Scotland.

The first in a new series will be published in 2025 by Allison & Busby, set in West Yorkshire in the 1990s.