Review: 'The Treatment' a spellbinding thriller

"The Treatment"
By Mo Hayder
Doubleday
Fiction
352 pages

(CNN) -- An unspeakable horror is prowling Brockwell Park. The South London police have no clue who terrorized the family living near the haphazard expanse, but the neighborhood children do. They call him "the troll." They say he snatches children from their homes and does atrocious things to them.

Detective Inspector Jack Caffery has no time for urban legends. He's trying to find a missing boy and the clock is ticking.

"The Treatment" is the second Jack Caffery case from author Mo Hayder. It's equal parts police procedural and psychological thriller, pitting a veteran detective against an unknown and monstrous foe. What sets the novel apart from others in the genre is the intricately interwoven threads of the plot.

Caffery isn't just trying to solve the case in front of him. He's also drawn back in time to his own boyhood, when his brother vanished under similar circumstances. All the while, he's struggling to maintain his relationship with Rebecca, a rape victim who became his girlfriend after he killed her attacker.

Colorful cast

Hayder deftly increases the tension on Caffery as the story progresses. He is yanked in three directions at once, trying to juggle his professional duties and his private demons, all the while clinging to a slim hope that solving the crime will somehow lead to a resolution of his personal conflicts.

The author populates the story with a colorful cast of supporting characters. From the Scottish lesbian who is Caffery's partner to the aging pedophile that lives across the way; from the brutalized family that lost a son to the shambling hermit who scavenges a crucial bit of evidence, Hayder infuses her story of gross inhumanity with very human touches.

She has a discerning eye for detail and a crisp prose style that throws landscapes into sharp relief. "It was one of the odd cloudless nights in which the wind keeps the stars clean and the sky never seems to get properly black," Hayder writes. "In the park, the trees moved as one, shivering where the wind licked at them."

Terrifying events, powerful read

Excruciatingly terrible things happen in "The Treatment." To Hayder's credit, she doesn't make them any more graphic than she needs to. Violence and sex are integral to the story. She carefully treads the line between exposition and exploitation.

The effect is mesmerizing. Despicable acts become even more powerful precisely because she withholds some of the details.

"The Treatment" is a spellbinder. The reader races from one page to the next, torn between rooting for the protagonist and anguishing over some of his actions. The complex personality of DI Caffery welds the disparate elements of the plot together. As he is drawn into a demimonde of depravity, he seems to lose his moral bearings.

Whether he will regain his balance before he solves the crime remains an open question until the climactic confrontation. Even then, Caffery's personal demons are not slain, only held at bay, leaving the reader yearning for yet another story about him. Here's hoping Hayder keeps them coming.