Mo Hayder

Detective Jack Caffery, the troubled hero of Birdman, returns to investigate a brutal attack on a London couple and the mysterious disappearance of their young son, a crime that brings him face to face with nightmarish memories of his own past.

The Treatment

Midsummer, and in an unassuming house on a quiet residential street on the edge of Brockwell Park in south London, a husband and wife are discovered. Badly dehydrated, they've been bound and beaten, the husband is close to death. But worse is to come: their young son is missing. When DI Jack Caffery of the Met's AMIT squad is called in to investigate, the similarities to events in his own past make it impossible for him to view this new crime with the necessary detachment. And as Jack digs deeper, as he attempts to hold his own life together in the face of ever more disturbing revelations about both the past and the present, the real nightmare begins. Horrifying, unforgettable, intense, THE TREATMENT is a novel that touches the raw nerve of our darkest imaginings.

Bad Girl Bex

Um, yeah...wow! Talk about a wild ride! Went straight from reading book one in the Jack Caffrey series by Mo Hayder, to reading the second one the next day and I really wasn't disappointed. In fact the second one was actually better that the first one - and that one was a master class in the crime fiction genre. So many plot threads carefully laid out and gradually woven together; some tied up, others left to purposely fray and unravel... I don't know how the woman manages to conceive of the tales that she dreams up - I'm just glad she still has another five or six books for me to enjoy, before I have to start inquiring as to when the next one is going to be published. 

I don't want to go into any details regarding the actual plot (plots!) within this novel. Plenty of other people have given adequate summations and to add any more would probably require me to give away spoilers (of which there are many to be had, if one reads the wrong review!) I'm just going to say that I absolutely loved this book. I read the first chapter on Saturday night, then had to put my Kindle on charge, so I went and listened to a couple of chapters of an ebook instead. I picked it back up again around midnight last night and read straight through to this morning, stopping only to feed cats, make coffee, visit the bathroom and engage in sufficient communication with the other half, to ensure that he didn't think I was ignoring him! 

I love the main character Jack. He's believable; as are all the characters in both of the books I've read so far by Hayder. The details are deftly woven into the plot, showing more than telling and never feeling forced. There is a central theme which some will find discomfiting, but it is no way given over to sensationalism or gratuitous description inserted purely for shock value. If you like a good creepy thriller that almost makes you start to wonder about the noises coming from elsewhere in your house and you fancy getting into a new series of crime/forensic/police procedurals that feature wonderfully despicable plots and believable characters, then you should definitely check out Mo Hayder. And in case anyone is wondering, yes, you should read them in the order they were published, because the central themes that reemerge - separate from the main plots - do so in chronological order and if you read book 2 before book 1, it'll definitely spoil some of the book for you.

The Treatment

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