THE HIDDEN KEYS

(Serpent’s Tail £12.99) THE ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island hangs over this caper in which a thief called Tancred promises a dying junkie called Willow he’ll do what he can to solve a family mystery.

An extremely wealthy businessman has left each of his five children a curious memento in his will and Willow is convinced that together they hold a clue — either to the remainder of her dad’s fortune or to something more meaningful.

What follows is an old-fashioned queststyle adventure as Tancred attempts to track down and decode the mementos with a raggle-taggle group of unsavoury characters hot on his heels.

Alexis has a lot of fun riffing on genre while also dishing up a modern-day morality tale on the economic inequalities of Toronto, in whose present-day streets the novel is set. It’s a curiously enjoyable mystery about the human compulsion to seek out signs, let down only by Alexis’s workmanlike prose.