Description
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. At the start of Hayder's superb third crime novel to feature Det. Insp. Jack Caffery (after The Treatment ), Sgt. Phoebe Flea Marley, a police diver, retrieves a severed hand from Bristol harbor. Without a corpse, the investigation stalls, until fingerprints identify the hand as belonging to Ian Mossy Mallows, a known heroin junkie. While Caffery pursues the drug angle, Flea uncovers a possible connection to muti , a brand of African witchcraft and traditional medicine that incorporates body parts into its rituals. Digging deeper, Caffery and Flea discover that Mallows may still be alive and the men responsible may be using muti as a cover for even darker purposes. Meanwhile, Flea mourns the accidental death of her parents two years earlier while they were diving in a remote pool in Africa's Kalahari desert. Hayder vividly evokes torture and drug abuse, but the violence is never gratuitous. Readers looking for visceral thrills need look no further than this gritty English series. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Once again Hayder—author of such acclaimed crime novels asxa0The Treatment (2001), The Devil of Nanking (2005), and Pig Island (2007)—masterfully exploresxa0the horrific boundaries of culture and evil. The setting is Bristol, England, where police diving expert “Flea” Marley is called in to investigate after a human hand is found in the Avon river. The discovery links Flea with burned-out detective Jack Caffery—the lead in both Birdman (1999), Hayder’s first novel, and The Treatment—and sets the pair on a journey into England’s heroin subculture. Followingxa0a trail that becomes darker with every turn, they move relentlessly toward a confrontation with practitioners of muthi, a form of African witchcraft that uses human body parts for healing and spell-casting rituals. Hayder has long been a master at blending crime and horror genres, but this time she outdoes herself, flip-flopping the supernatural and the explainable like a cycle of poison and antidote that will remain with the reader long after the final page. Superviolent, but for those with strong stomachs, completely gripping. --Elliott Swanson
Features & Highlights
- Mo Hayder's previous novels
- The Devil of Nanking
- and
- The Treatment
- have ranked her among the most exciting and provocative thriller writers now working. In her latest,
- Ritual
- , Hayder gives us a taut, chilling tale of clandestine occult practices, New Age medicine, and the drug underground, set in a hypermodern urban landscape challenged by colliding immigrant cultures.Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Even more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed. DI Jack Caffery has been newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. He and Flea soon establish that the hand belong to a young man who has recently disappeared. Their search for him—and for his abductor—lead them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where one of Africa's most disturbing rituals may be making an unexpected appearance.
