The Treatment [Hardcover]

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 Kaveney

"'The first controversial British thriller of the new millennium' Val McDermid 'Treading the path blazed by Thomas Harris' Publishers Weekly 'Extraordinarily good' Daily Mail 'A major new talent' Guardian 'It'll scare the hell out of you' Elle 'Fearsome' The Times 'Horror to set the heart fluttering' Sunday Express"

A husband and wife are found bound and imprisoned in their South London home. What's worse is that their young son is missing. DI Jack Caffery is called in to investigate, but similar events from his own past make it impossible for him to view this crime with the necessary detachment.

Midsummer: Donegal Crescent, a quiet residential street on the edge of Brockwell Park in south London. A husband and wife are discovered bound and imprisoned in their own home. They are badly dehydrated, have been beaten, and the husband is close to death. But worse is to come: their young son is missing.

When DI Jack Caffery of the Met's murder squad, AMIT, 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.

By the same author: BIRDMAN 'Extraordinarily good.' Daily Mail 'One of the best things I've read.' Independent 'A first-class shocker.' Guardian 'Horror to set the heart fluttering.' Sunday Express 'Fearsome.' The Times 'It'll scare the hell out of you.' Elle

Mo Hayder
Mo Hayder was born in Essex. After leaving school at fifteen she worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Vietnam. She now writes full time and is the author of Birdman and The Treatment both published by Bantam Books.

(17 July)

When it was all over, DI Jack Caffery, South London Area Major Investigation Team (AMIT), would admit that, of all the things he had witnessed in Brixton that cloudy July evening, it was the crows that jarred him the most. They were there when he came out of the Peaches' house - twenty or more of them standing in their hooded way on the lawn of the neighbouring garden, oblivious to the police tape, the onlookers, the technicians. Some had their beaks open. Others appeared to be panting. All of them faced him directly - as if they knew what had happened in the house. As if they were having a sly laugh about the way he'd reacted to the scene. The unprofessional way he was taking it too personally.

Later he would accept that the crows' behaviour was a biological tic, that they couldn't see into his thoughts, couldn't have known what had happened to the Peach family, but even so the sight of them made the back of his neck tingle. He paused at the top of the garden path to strip off his overalls and hand them to a forensics officer, pulled on the shoes he'd left outside the police tape, and waded out into the birds. They took to the air, rattling their petrolly feathers.

Brockwell Park - a huge, thrown-together isosceles of forest and grass with its apex at Herne Hill station - rambles for over a mile along the boundary of two very different parts of South London. On its western perimeter, the badlands of Brixton - where some mornings council workers have to drop sand on the streets to soak up the blood - and, to the east, Dulwich, with its flower-drenched almshouses and John Soane skylights. Donegal Crescent lay snug up against Brockwell Park, anchored at one foot by a boarded-up pub, at the other by a Gujarati-owned corner shop. It was part of a quiet little council estate, rows of fifties terraced houses bare to the sky, no trees in the front gardens, doors painted chocolate brown. The houses looked on to a horseshoe-shaped piece of balding grass where kids skidded their bikes in the evening. Caffery could imagine the Peaches must have felt relatively safe here.

Back in his shirt-sleeves, grateful for the fresh air outside, he rolled a cigarette and crossed to the group of officers next to the Scientific Support Command Unit's van. They fell silent as he approached and he knew what they were thinking. He was only in his mid thirties - not a senior-rank warhorse - but most officers in South London knew who he was. 'One of the Met's Young Turks', the Police Review had called him. He knew he was respected in the force and he always found it a bit freaky. If they knew half of it. He hoped they wouldn't notice that his hands were trembling.

'Well?' He lit the cigarette and looked at a sealed plastic evidence bag a junior forensics officer was holding. 'What've you got?' 'We found it just inside the park, sir, about twenty yards from the back of the Peaches'.'

Caffery took the bag and turned it over carefully. A Nike Air Server trainer, a child's shoe, slightly smaller than his hand. 'Who found it?' 'The dogs, sir.' 'And?' 'They lost the trail. At first they had it - they had it good, really good.' A sergeant in the blue shirt of the dog handlers' unit stood on tiptoe and pointed over the roofs to where the park rose in the distance, blotting out the sky with its dark woods. 'They took us round the path that scoots over the west of the park - but after about half a mile they just drew a blank.' He looked dubiously at the evening sky. 'And we've lost the light now.' 'Right. I think we need to speak to Air Support.' Caffery passed the trainer back to the forensics officer. 'It should be in an air-drying bag.' 'I'm sorry?' 'There's blood on it. Didn't you see?'

The SSCU's dragonlights powered up, flooding the Peaches' house, spilling light on to the trees in the park beyond. In the front garden forensics officers in blue rubberized suits swept the lawn with dustpans, and outside the police tape shock-faced neighbours stood in knots, smoking and whispering, breaking off to huddle around any plain-clothed AMIT detective who came near, full of questions. The press were there too. Losing patience. Caffery stood next to the Command Unit van and stared up at the house. It was a two-storey terraced house - pebble- dashed, a satellite dish on the roof, aluminium-framed windows and a small patch of damp above the front door. There were matching scalloped nets in each window, and the curtains had been drawn tight.

He had only seen the Peach family, or what was left of it, in the aftermath, but he felt as if he knew them. Or, rather, he knew their archetype. The parents - Alek and Carmel - weren't going to be easy victims for the team to sympathize with: both drinkers, both unemployed, Carmel Peach had sworn at the paramedics as they moved her into the ambulance. Their only son, nine-year-old Rory, Caffery hadn't seen. By the time he'd arrived the divisional officers had already pulled the house apart trying to find the child - in the cupboards, the attic, even behind the bath panelling. There was a thin trace of blood on the skirting-board in the kitchen and the glass in the back door was broken. Caffery had taken a Territorial Support Group officer with him to search a boarded-up property two doors down, crawling through a hole in the back door on their bellies, flashlights in their teeth like an adolescent's SAS fantasy. All they found were the usual homeless nesting arrangements. There was no other sign of life. No Rory Peach...