The Treatment Book

Sometimes things are far worse than you can possibly imagine. Mo Hayder's second novel The Treatment takes us further into the heart of psychological darkness than we expect to go. Someone broke into the Peaches' house and left a husband and wife chained to radiators to die of thirst and starvation, taking their young son off to an even worse fate. Inspector Jack Caffery lost his own brother to abduction and murder, which makes his hunt for the killer perhaps rather too personal. Caffery is in a dysfunctional relationship with the equally disturbed sculptor Rebecca, who survived with him through the events of Hayder's Birdman; the edginess this gives him makes him at once a brilliant investigator of an insane crime and a danger to all around him. And the killer has already struck again--another family are chained up in their home, awaiting the worst atrocity of all...This is a compellingly dark thriller--Hayder's sense of South London as an overlapping patchwork of social worlds is particularly strong and she makes an ordinary place like Brockwell Park a site of deep unease. Hayder's imaginative intensity makes her book a powerful nightmare, but works just as well when describing Caffery's eventual healing. --Roz KaveneyRead More