FORGIVE THE FOOTBALL analogy — it’s that time of the decade — but there are two ways to score as a thriller writer: one is to let the plot unfold organically, building the pace gradually to a furious finish; the other is a set-piece, action from the off.

Relentless belongs to the latter category. Our hero is at home playing with his kids on a Saturday afternoon when he gets a phone call. On the other end of the line, he hears an old friend reveal his address under torture before being murdered.

Just the thing to concentrate the mind. Worse, the old pal is calling from his home, barely 15 minutes’ drive away. That means, in all probability, that our hero has that time at most to bundle his children into a car and escape from evil men who wish him harm for no known reason.

Kernick certainly knows how to get our attention. For his hero, Tom Meron, a middle-of-the-road sales executive with a software company, the next 24 hours are about to make Jack Bauer look like a bloke with an easy life.

After leaving the kids with mother-in-law, he discovers that his wife is missing, is attacked by a masked man with a knife, arrested on suspicion of murder, then as a possible accomplice when his wife is suspected of murder. And we have yet to get to the link to a high-level paedophile ring, an old murder, his wife’s infidelity and his children’s abduction, not to mention meeting Lench, a war veteran whose hobbies are torture and rape.

Kernick switches between a first-person account from Meron’s point of view and old-fashioned third-person narration. This split perspective is an increasingly popular way of telling stories and one that purists — including me — tend to consider a cheat. But it makes for a fluent read.

Part of Kernick’s appeal is the down-to-earth realism of his settings — outer London suburbia and the Home Counties — the sort of nitty-gritty that makes his readers feel that this could be happening on their own doorstep.

So it is a pity that lack of preparation lets him down. To reinforce the pace of action, he has set it on a Saturday, the unfolding terror plotted against the familiar ritual timetable of Saturday afternoon football.

Unfortunately, he gets it wrong. Sorry, Simon, but there are NO English Premiership matches shown on television at 3.00pm on a Saturday, not even on Sky (it would damage gate receipts). And even if there were, there would definitely not be an England game on at the same time (where would the players come from?).

So there you have it: a fine performance marred by an unfortunate own goal. Another time he might have got away with it. But not this week.

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