Ritual (Mo Hayder) PB-Like new

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The heroine of Mo Hayder”s Ritual is Sergeant Flea Marley, a female police diver who, one April afternoon, finds an amputated hand in the murky waters of Bristol Harbor. A predictable opening for a police procedural, but we are also in for horror. She gave the hand a experimental tug .it floated free of the silt, coming away easily. At the place where a wrist should be there was just raw bone and gristle. Hayder plunges us into a claustrophobic, distorted world, just as she did in her previous, and perhaps finest, novel, Pig Island. We resurface spooked and unsettled by her vivid depiction of drug addiction, prostitution, murder, sadism, insanity and, of course, body parts. [I]f there was one thing he d been around the block with it was the mutilation of the human body, exhausted chief inspector Jack Caffrey reflects, and he”d known more distressing combinations of the way the familiar can become the unfamiliar than he cared to remember. Caffrey, introduced in Hayder s early novel Birdman, here works alongside Flea Marley on killings that are connected to drugs but that also expose a black market for body parts, right there in quaint old Bristol. The investigation is, however, just one strand in an intricate, often brutal novel of shifting perspectives and disconcerting echoes. Hayder keeps us guessing not only about what is happening but also about who these people are. The familiar becomes the horribly unfamiliar as, with clinical precision and yet palpable compassion, she once again reveals the human heart to be the most damaged body part of all. —Anna Mundow