Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder

Disclaimer: I adore Mo Hayder’s writing – her twisty but never implausible plotting, her gimlet-eyed view of her jaundiced casts – and can’t claim to approach her work with a lack of bias. She is particularly noted for grisly frankness, which even by crime thriller standards is unusually confronting (her second novel, 2001’s The Treatment, had themes of paedophilia and other child abuse), and perhaps it is this, combined with the lack of self-conscious or artifice in her writing or characters, which makes her so compelling.

Unlike 2010’s Gone, part of her Walking Man series featuring several recurring characters, her new work Hanging Hill is a stand-alone novel which centres on the murder of a pretty young high-schooler in the historic English city of Bath. The girl’s body is found shortly after her failure to return from a daytime shopping trip. She is discovered with a tennis ball wedged into her mouth; two messages are scrawled on her bare torso in bright lipstick. The motive for the killing is unclear.

While this crime drives the plot, the real story, set up in a cryptic prologue involving a conversation at a funeral, is about two adult sisters, Zoe and Sally. As the tale unfolds, it emerges that Zoe and Sally have been estranged since childhood, following an event so traumatic that the girls’ parents determined it would be best to separate them forever, starting with different boarding schools.

The separation stuck, though the two remain in Bath, averting their eyes when they see each other in the street and keeping abreast of each others’ lives through the chance comments of mutual acquaintances. Zoe knows of Sally’s recent divorce – though not that its cause was her husband’s affair with their blowsy Australian au pair, with whom he now has a new baby – and Sally tracks Zoe’s career with the Bath police.

Both women bear heavy emotional and practical burdens. Zoe copes with the pressures of her job and a tentative affair with a colleague by self-harming, while Sally’s lack of financial acumen has her hovering just above penury. Both women are led by their choices and circumstances towards one another and, more precipitously, in the direction of Bath’s dark underbelly and some miscreants who have fetched up there (including a delightfully repellent big-time pornographer who inadvertently becomes a vivid fulcrum of the narrative).

The investigation of the initial murder is what first snares the sisters and may bring them freedom. Zoe is part of the investigating team, and the dead girl was an acquaintance of Sally’s daughter Millie. The two teenagers had several friends in common, some of whom become suspects (in the loosest sense of the term – there is a dearth of vim and vigour in Hayder’s version of the Bath constabulary) thanks to some criminal profiling that is more convenient than accurate.

Hayder has a particular knack for character creation, and for even-handedness, drawing out the good as she does the bad. It is all too easy in crime writing to set up a couple of red-herring, paint-by-numbers villains, while artfully concealing the diabolical sociopathy of that nice, nondescript chap who’s been under the reader’s nose the whole time.

This writer never does so, instead constructing her story so craftily, with such sleight of hand, that the mysteries of the chapters seem to unfold for her just as they do her reader. She is indisputably one of the greats.

4 / 5 stars: Menacing and masterful.

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Gone by Mo Hayder

Those new to Mo Hayder but partial to a gripping thriller will be tantalized by the author blurb in this seventh crime novel from the British writer: “Mo Hayder has written some of the most terrifying crime thrillers you will ever read. Her first novel, Birdman, was hailed as a ‘first-class shocker’ by the Guardian and her follow-up, The Treatment, was voted by The Times one of ‘the top ten most scary thrillers ever written.’”

Crikey. Nothing like the weight of expectation. Happily, this is a case of underpromising and overdelivering. Gone is lengthy, at more than 400 densely-packed pages, but plotted with extreme skill. It doesn’t flag for a moment, and Hayder expertly balances the main storyline with a related sub-plot (the woman Caffery yearns for, police diver Sergeant Flea Marley, undertakes her own, subterranean search to find the villain at the centre of the story).

The best thrillers kick into action immediately, and accordingly, the first page of Gone has Hayder’s recurring protagonist, DI Jack Caffery, contemplating a crime scene. It happens to be a public street in which a Santa Claus mask-wearing man wrestled a woman away from her car and drove off – with her young daughter in the back seat.

Several similar incidents quickly follow, and it becomes apparent to Caffery and his team that this serial offender wants something more than either the cars or the children. But the preternatural intelligence and foresight of the Jacker, as he becomes known, is stymieing the investigators: it’s as if he has access to information that is so high-level even the police can’t get at it. But what? And what is he after?

In desperation, Caffery turns to the Walking Man, a middle-aged vagrant whom Caffery is in the habit of visiting. The Walking Man is well-known to locals as a former successful businessman whose young daughter was abducted, raped and murdered by an itinerant offender on probation. The Walking Man took grisly revenge on the killer, and now spends his days roaming the countryside, searching for his daughter’s body and sleeping rough.

Gone is the third novel from Hayder to feature the Walking Man, whose bond with Caffery adds complexity and richness to the story (they are close in part because Caffery’s brother went missing at age eight, and the offender, probably a local paedophile, was never brought to justice). Caffery sees the Walking Man as possessing unique and valuable wisdom. As Hayder writes: “[Caffery had] learned that in this relationship, he was the pupil and the Walking Man was the teacher.”

(A note for sensitive readers: Hayder’s oeuvre as a whole is one in which bad things happening to children is a recurring theme.)

It’s always best to reserve judgement on a book, especially one in this genre, where the pay-off is all. At times, I found myself holding my breath while reading Gone; I was enjoying it so much, and so clueless as to what was coming next, that I desperately hoped Hayder could deliver. She does.

It’s a great treat to discover a new favourite writer, and Hayder, with her knack for plotting and the evocation of mood, is one for any fan of clever, suspenseful fiction.

4/5 Stars: Truly stunning, but not for the faint-hearted.  Follow this link for more Easy Mix Book Reviews