How do you create suspense? I’ll tell you later. That’s the defining strategy of THE SEARCHER (Morrow/Harper­Collins, $26.99), as Simon Toyne holds information tantalizingly out of reach over the course of his wild, mysterious novel. We begin with a man stumbling down a road with no pigment in his skin, no shoes on his feet and no idea who or where or when he is. Behind him, a crashed plane sends off waves of fire and a pillar of smoke. He might have survived the crash or he might have caused it; he doesn’t know. He knows only that he’s here — in Redemption, Ariz. — to save a man whose body is inconveniently being lowered into a hilltop cemetery at that very moment.

With that opener, Toyne grabs our attention, and he keeps it. Every answer leads to another question. The amnesiac discovers his name, Solomon Creed, from the inscription in a book he carries, a book apparently given to him by the dead man and written by the town’s founder, a religious prophet. Its enigmatic pages are slowly revealed to the reader, and so is Creed himself.

He has encyclopedic knowledge of airplanes, languages, horses, guns, drugs, the physics of a crash site. He can fight like a ninja and diagnose like a doctor. “For a man with no memory, you sure seem to know a lot of stuff,” the sheriff says to Creed. Think of him as Jason Bourne’s weirdo cousin.

The book moves so swiftly in part because it’s told roughly in the span of a day, and in part because we’re left hanging and hanging and hanging, the stakes escalating while mysteries pile on top of mysteries. Here’s a sampling of the many cliffhangers that close the chapters: “She . . . stepped into the sanctuary of her home — and stopped dead when she saw what was inside.” “I found blood.” “ ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘There’s something you should probably see.’ ” “Then the phone clicked and went dead.” Virtually every chapter concludes with some tease of a revelation only to be followed by a chapter from a different point of view, forcing the reader to wait, maddeningly, for an answer. Is Creed an angel or a cartel assassin? Are the sheriff and the mayor in on a scheme to control the town’s trust funds? Who is Papa Tío, the villain who remains offstage for much of the novel’s first half, and why does everyone fear him as though he were the Devil himself? If it’s a familiar setup, it’s also a winning one. This book is almost 500 pages long, and I read it in a two-day fever.