November 15, 2008

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Crime, horror meet maker in Ritual
By JC Patterson
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Mo Hayder is one spooky lady. Since her 2000 debut, Birdman, the prize-winning British author has unleashed three equally disturbing novels, mixing a macabre hybrid of crime and horror.

Hayder's life story is as equally engrossing as her characters. Hayder led a sheltered, middle-class life in England. But at age 15, she quit school, walked the seamier side of London, then later, Tokyo, where she became a nightclub hostess.

Working as a barmaid, a security guard and a filmmaker, Hayder went on to receive a Master of Arts in film in Washington, D.C., and a master's in creative writing in Bath, England. Hayder's life and locales have greatly influenced her body of work.

Hayder brings back troubled Detective Inspector Jack Caffery in Ritual (Atlantic, $22). Last seen in The Treatment, Caffery has left his beat and possessive girlfriend in London for the west country town of Bristol. He's also trying to quiet the ghost of his long-missing brother, the victim of a pedophile some 30 years back.

But crime doesn't sleep, even in smaller confines. Beneath the River Avon, a severed hand is discovered. As a skilled diver for the Bristol police, Phoebe "Flea" Marley is familiar with a body part or two, dredged up from suicides. But this particular find carries evil portents.

Flea and Caffery soon team up and recover the second severed hand beneath a local eatery.

Is it drug-related or something far more sinister? The tainted trail soon leads to a grisly revelation. The hands are part of an African ritual dealing with medicinal witchcraft.

Flea becomes engrossed in the case when she finds a link between it and her parents' accidental deaths. Meanwhile, Caffery spends time with a reclusive ex-con called The Walking Man to examine the darkness that consumes him.

Hayder takes chilling glimpses inside the mind of the handless victim, a local drug user, willing to do almost anything for his next fix. The kid never counted on losing his life, piece by piece. Now another ritual is in place, and the son of one of Flea's diving team members has gone missing.

The detective and the diver haul their dark personas into overdrive to save a life forfeited to black market body parts and a culture shrouded in fear and magic. The outcome is as grisly as it gets.

Ritual makes the goosebumps rise and places Hayder in the ranks of crime masters.