Ritual (Jack Caffery)

by Mo Hayder

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. Yet 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 hands belong to a boy 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 an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others ...

• ISBN10: 014311607X
• ISBN13: 9780143116073
• Publish Date: 1 September 2009 (first published 10 March 2008)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 27 July 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Penguin USA
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 486
• Language: English

Reviews

[pamela]

While Ritual was certainly much better than The Treatment, and I absolutely devoured it in a number of days, Hayder still hasn't quite found the hard-hitting perfection she found in her debut, Birdman.

Jack Caffery has returned but in a different setting. There are unresolved threads from his previous life in London which aren't dealt with, and all the characters we'd become invested in are replaced by Caffery's new object of affection with almost no mention of the police force at large.

While the pace of the plot is speedy and exciting just like Hayder's other novels, this one felt somehow unfinished. I did not feel satisfied toward the end, and felt like too much had been left unfinished. So much of the plot also relied on coincidences between the characters which were almost laughably contrived as it was Caffery's first case in Bristol.

Hayder once again shows herself to be a talented writer, as I felt myself unwilling to put the book down and just kept turning pages to find out what happened next. However getting to the end left me disappointed that there hadn't been more to it. With such a big set up, the end came too quickly and too anticlimactically to leave me feeling any sense of resolution.

Will I read the next Caffery thriller? Almost certainly, if only to find out if the resolution that I found so lacking in this novel will appear in the next.