He photographs the worst day of your life. He has never once had a bad one.

Terry Crake has worked the London patch since 1979. Doorsteps, hospital car parks, schoolgates, coroners’ courts. He is sixty-four, freelance, and thoroughly despised, which suits him, because nobody guards themselves against a man they have already written off.

He is also having the best year of his career. Every tip lands. He is in the right street four times a week. Something is going wrong in London at a rate he has never known, and Terry Crake is standing in the middle of it with a camera, invoicing.

Then a colleague dies, and Crake buys forty years of the man’s negatives off his widow for eighty pounds. Stock, bought cheap.

In carton eleven, in a crowd outside a magistrates’ court in November 1966, a man stands at the edge of the frame with his hands down and his face three-quarters away.

It is Crake. He is sixty-four in that photograph too.

So he runs the only investigation of his career into himself, with the same bins, bought doormen and patience he would use on anybody else. A relative. A lookalike. A hoax. Five answers, taken apart one at a time, until none of them is standing.

Then he goes into his own archive. Eleven thousand contact sheets. Nine days, a loupe and a pencil, thirty seconds a sheet.

And what he finds is not about ageing at all.

A literary thriller with an unreliable narrator you will root for against your own better judgement. For readers of Claire North, David Mitchell, and anyone who finished You and felt slightly implicated.

Paparazzo is Book One of Weights and Measures, a five-book sequence. Each volume re-reads the one before it from an irreconcilable point of view.