The Man Made of Smoke

The Man Made of Smoke (2025) by Alex North is a Gothic-tinged crime thriller that blurs the line between supernatural terror and psychological trauma. Criminal profiler Dan Garvie has been haunted since childhood by a terrifying encounter with a serial killer. When Dan’s father vanishes after discovering a brutal murder, Dan is forced to confront the past he desperately wants to leave behind. Tracking Dan as he searches for the shadowy figure who took his father, the tense, twisty plot explores themes of The Ordinary Face of Evil, The Complex Silence Between Fathers and Sons, and Survivor’s Guilt and the Search for Redemption.

This guide refers to the Penguin Books Kindle 2025 edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness, death, child death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, child abuse, physical abuse, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

The novel opens in a past timeline as 12-year-old Daniel “Dan” Garvie and his best friend, Sarah Ross, return from a day trip with Dan’s parents, John and Maggie. The group stops at a busy highway service station for a break, and Dan visits the men’s restroom. In the restroom, the guardrails of the real world seem to fall away, and Dan hears an eerie whistling tune coming from a toilet stall. An emaciated and terrified-looking child stands in front of the stall, clearly in peril. Dan wants to talk to the child, but when he hears the stall open, he instinctively shuts himself into an adjoining cubicle. He hears adult footsteps emerge and a voice saying, “Nobody sees and nobody cares” (3). Soon, the adult and the boy exit the restroom, leaving behind a photo on the floor. Scared, Dan finally opens the door, and he sees that the photo is of another child, on the verge of being killed.

John, who is a police officer, reports the photo, and the child is identified as the missing Robbie Garforth. In a strange chain of events, police discover a camper van in the middle of the road a few days later, containing the bodies of a man and Robbie. An investigation reveals that the man is the same person whose whistling tune Dan heard in the restroom and that the man is a serial killer linked with the murders of three other boys. During the subsequent probe, Dan is pressured into identifying the boy he saw in the restroom as Robbie, the boy in the photo, though he knows that the two children are different.

The sensational murder case gains media attention, and the man is dubbed the “Pied Piper” because of his trademark whistling tune. Terrence O’Hare, a journalist, authors the book The Man Made of Smoke, an account of the case that particularly describes the day when the killer brazenly strolled through the busy arcade with an imperiled boy in tow, stopping unnoticed before stalls and food counters, before heading to the restroom. The book contains photos of all the Pied Piper’s victims, as well as the police’s sketch of the boy at the service station, based on Dan’s description. The boy in the sketch is noticeably different from Robbie, but the difference is attributed to the tricky nature of memory.

Two decades later, Dan is a forensic psychiatrist who works in a prison. Maggie, his mother, left their family a long time ago. John, retired from the police force, lives alone in the family’s island home; his relationship with Dan has suffered in the aftermath of the service-station episode. Dan now visits John sporadically, preferring to stay on the mainland most of the time. However, Dan is pulled back into the island’s orbit when he receives a phone call informing him that his father may have died by suicide. Upon returning to the island, Dan learns that John’s car was found abandoned near a cliff by Craig Aspinall, a man in his seventies who is the island’s unofficial caretaker. The police suspect that John may have jumped off the cliff. However, Dan soon learns that there’s more to John’s disappearance than meets the eye.

Through Sarah (who’s back on the island to wrap up her deceased mother’s business), Dan learns that John stumbled upon the charred corpse of a woman in the forest just days before his disappearance. As Dan digs further, he realizes that his father was investigating the woman and left a trail of clues for Dan to follow. The clues lead Dan and Sarah to realize that the woman in the woods was Rose Saunders, one of the people who saw the Pied Piper at the arcade on that terrible afternoon.

Soon, it becomes clear that a string of murders is being committed: An unknown killer is targeting all the “witnesses” of the service-station incident. The killer’s modus operandi is to abduct a witness, make them watch the horrifying murder and torture of another, and leave them with the choice to report the matter to the police. Regardless of what they choose, the killer murders the witnesses, one by one. Dan realizes that John, also a witness, didn’t die by suicide but was abducted by the killer.

As Dan ponders the killer’s motive in the present timeline, he wonders whether the boy he saw at the service station, who was never identified or found, could have survived and grown up to become a copycat killer. Finding out the boy’s identity is crucial to catching the present-day killer. The narrative threads converge when Dan stumbles upon John’s discovery of the boy’s identity: The boy is James Palmer, an 11-year-old believed to have drowned during a seaside vacation with his mother, Abigail. Overcome with grief, Abigail died of an overdose shortly after James went missing. Ever since John discovered James’s identity, he has visited Abigail’s grave to honor her memory.

A parallel narrative timeline told from James’s perspective establishes that he didn’t drown but was abducted by the Pied Piper from the shore. The Pied Piper kept James alive for three years, grooming him to join him in his murderous spree, but James refused to lose his empathy. The night after the Pied Piper took James to the service station to prove to him that people don’t care for others, James tried to free Robbie. The Pied Piper caught James and killed him and Robbie, but he was soon engulfed by the fire that James had set in his cellar. While fleeing the fire in his camper van, the Pied Piper died of his injuries.

Meanwhile, Dan realizes that James can’t be the man targeting the witnesses. Matters escalate when the killer abducts Sarah, directing Dan to meet him in a spot deep in the woods. The killer puts Sarah in a pen next to John, who is weak but still alive. Recognizing Sarah’s cries, John gathers his strength and works to uproot the post to which he’s tied. When Dan reaches the spot, the killer incapacitates him and drags him to the pens. John uses the uprooted post to strike the killer, who is revealed to be Craig Aspinall, the father of James Palmer.

Aspinall is arrested. He admits to murdering five witnesses and is incarcerated. He reveals to Dan that he was imprisoned for robbery when Abigail and James died and that he learned of their fates only after he was released. Believing that James’s death was an accident, he returned to live on the island where he was raised. The realization that James was a target of the Pied Piper killer dawned on him decades later when he saw John visit Abigail’s grave, leaving on it a copy of The Man Made of Smoke. Aspinall read the book, saw the sketch based on Dan’s memories, and immediately knew that the boy was his son, so he embarked on his campaign to punish the witnesses. As the novel ends, Dan and John pay tribute to James, and Dan begins to date Sarah.