Tangled Web UK Review November 2008
Ritual by
Mo Hayder
pbk out November 08
(Bantam)
at £6.99
In a few years, Mo Hayder has established herself as one of the UK’s best-selling thriller writers and her fifth book is a good showcase for her talents. It reintroduces her original protagonist, DI Jack Caffrey, but relocates him from London to the West Country. However, the lead character is Sergeant ‘Flea’ Marley, a police diver who locates a human hand in Bristol harbour, thus setting in motion a train of events that - as in previous Hayder novels - are grisly and shocking. It is soon established that the hand was removed from someone who was alive at the time and I found one or two scenes, including those describing the events that led to the loss of the hand, quite distressing, albeit skilfully done. Both Flea and Caffrey are, as convention demands, characters whose lives are shadowed by dark events from the past, but Hayder is a sensitive enough writer to make their agonies seem genuine and sometimes poignant. Flea experiments with an obscure drug as she attempts to confront her demons, and starts to develop a bond with Caffrey, who in his turn strikes up an odd relationship with ‘the Walking Man’, whose own past includes sadistic revenge torture and killing, and who is now a gentleman of the West Country roads and apt to indulge in cryptic philosophising. The book is a mix of strong, colourful ingredients, and although a few things jarred with me, Hayder is an ambitious writer and it is inevitable that not everything an ambitious writer tries out is effective. Overall, I found this a genuinely impressive action thriller. The paperback edition includes at the end Hayder’s comments on her revival of Caffrey, and her frank discussion of the genesis of the book is extremely interesting. Hayder’s work is not for the faint-hearted, but her success is no fluke - she has real insight and story-telling gifts.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
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