Product Description

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 ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #231519 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk
When it comes to crime novels designed to chill the blood in their unblinking treatment of the darkest recesses of human behaviour, Mo Hayder is unquestionably in the forefront of British practitioners in the field. What is even more striking is the fact that more than any other female writer, she is moving comfortably in the bloody territory that has long been the traditional prerogative of male writers, and never for a second allows her writing to be any less disturbing than that of her male confrères.

Ritual is par for a course where this writer is concerned: a tough, scarifying novel, delivered with maximum narrative rigour. A police diver discovers a severed human hand in Bristol's floating harbour. Shortly afterwards, another hand -- from the same victim -- is found buried underneath a restaurant. The severed hands are those of a young heroin addict who has recently gone missing from the Bristol drugs scene. A police diver, Flea Marley, finds herself joining forces with DI Jack Caffrey, recently seconded to the Major Crime Investigation unit. Jack is attempting to come to terms with the murder of his brother, but finds himself more than occupied with the details of the death of Mossy, the young heroin addict. It appears that the latter has become embroiled in a sinister black market trade stemming from Africa, where the value of human life is held at less than nothing. Jack and Flea form an uneasy alliance, tackling together a world steeped in the most appalling torture and abuse of human life. Those who have read the powerful predecessors to this novel (such as Birdman and The Treatment) will know what to expect. Mo Hayder is always reliable in delivering riveting (if deeply uncomfortable) reads. --Barry Forshaw

LONDON LITE, 4 March 2008
'There's something almost feral about her fiction compared with other British crime writers. She may be foxy but she's also bloody scary'

DAILY MIRROR, 7 March 2008
Expect plenty of blood, gore and black magic'

Customer Reviews

No Mo, no!
As an avid Hayder fan I was left sorely disappointed by this book. It almost feels like a first novel and lacks the characteristic Hayder looking-over-the-characters'-shoulder-and-under-their-skin style of writing. I would describe this as 'Mo-lite'. If you are new to her then go read The Treatment. You will be impressed. Ritual is okay for fans (like me) but not recommended. Quite simply, there are too many other writers doing this stuff so much better.

Cliché-police alert! This novel contains the phrase "not someone but something'"

Come on. Mo - we know you can do better!

The first in a promising new series - 'The Walking Man'
In her previous book (the fairly bad 'Pig Island') Mo Hayder depicted mystical/supernatural events which eventually proved to have a much more commonplace rationale behind them.

There's more of that in here, where she focuses on African folklore and tribal rituals and it's refreshing to see her debunking this kind of nonsense. When I began reading I thought the book would be heavily supernatural, but this proved erroneous: 'Ritual' is more or less a straightforward crime novel

Bafflingly billed as the first in 'The Walking Man' series it actually features this character in only a few non-crucial scenes; he's not central to the plot or in fact necessary at all other that to introduce us to him. What Mo does do however is bring back police detective Jack Caffery - last seen in 'The Treatment' - and a new character, the flawed, 29 year old police diver Phoebe 'Flea' Marley, who has demons in her past just like Caffery.

There's one or two loose ends left dangling - particularly relating to Jack Caffery - but no doubt these will be further explored as the series develops.

Mo Hayder is a very talented writer and has at least one great book in her. This isn't it, but it's a decent enough read and genuinely creepy in parts. A nice start to a series that could develop into something special.

An anti-climax from the first chapter
I'm a Mo Hayder fan. I pre-ordered RITUAL many months before its release, partly because it features front-man DI Jack Caffery, but mainly because the previous novel (THE TREATMENT) ended with a masterful piece of writing that left the reader knowing a crucial piece of information that was unknown to the fictitious detective. I'm sure thousands of readers of that story could hardly wait to see how it was carried over to this, the third in the series. And we've been waiting for seven years, no less.

It would be cruel to so much as provide a hint as to what happens next in that deeply personal element of the life of Jack Caffery, so I won't. I will say however that what we are given doesn't altogether make sense, and in some ways this is not the Caffery we had grown to admire and care for. First of all, he shares the lead with an entirely new character: 29-year-old police diver Phoebe 'Flea' Marley, who bears the weight of vaguely similar family agonies to those of Caffery - in her case it's her parents, in his it's his brother. Both assume some sense of responsibility for their loved ones' fates, and in Caffery's case he somewhat mysteriously seeks guidance from an enigmatic and some might say surreal character known only as The Walking Man. Flea's character, while slightly one-dimensional in her obsession for finding answers to her parents' demise, is nevertheless well drawn and interesting. Caffery on the other hand seems to be rather a different animal to the one we thought we knew, and in some ways he has lost our trust. Well, mine anyway. I gained the impression that certain aspects of this story might have been influenced by the author's publishers, who presumably agreed to finance this 'new' series apparently built around The Walking Man. That's the weak link for me; if this is to be a new series then the characters should be all new. There's a degree of confusion in the inclusion of Jack Caffery when perhaps an entirely new character in his place might have made more sense, leaving the opportunity for Hayder to write a more logical and natural follow-up to the previous Caffery novel.

As it is, it's quite good but not in the same league as the first two Caffery outings. It revolves around yet another dark and repellent topic just as Hayder normally does, but a lot of the passion is missing. If anything, we rely on the new character of Flea Marley for much of the emotional appeal, because Caffery this time round comes over as less complex and merely a hardened and uncompromising copper. For me this was an anti-climax and not at all what I had hoped for, but it's far from bad. I just hope that in future Mo Hayder lets her heart rule her head and allow the passion to rule over the business of writing crime fiction.