The Treatment

Mo Hayder

The last page of The Treatment, Mo Hayder's second (and, according to interviews, final) Jack Caffery novel, is likely to leave readers screaming in frustration. It wouldn't surprise me to find out she'd been abducted by some crazed male version of Stephen King's Annie Wilkes and held against her will until she promises a third novel tying up the loose ends left at the conclusion of this book. We are an impatient lot, we mystery readers, and we don't want the questions left unanswered. More fool us. The end of The Treatment, as with the whole latter half of the book, is wonderfully written, a cracking good mystery that does her debut novel, Birdman, justice. Unfortunately, it's prefaced by the first half, which does nothing much justice.

The book starts slow. Did I mention slow? I mean slow. Proust could have given Hayder some pacing lessons in the opening chapters. We are reintroduced to Jack Caffery, just about a year after the events in the final pages of Birdman. He's still Jack Caffery, jaded, not sleeping well, far too thin for his own good, unable to figure out how to make a relationship work, and completely obsessed with his job. his time, his job involves figuring out what happened to a child who was abducted from his home after the abductor had stayed in the house for three days. Readers of Birdman will recognize that this is ground Jack Caffery will not want to tread. (There is also, in the opening chapters, a piece of misdirection that is blatant, after one finishes the book, and very badly handled. A few points off for lack of editing.) We then spend the next hundred fifty pages or so getting to know the principals and a few ancillary characters; while character development is never a bad thing, it's as if the plot slows to a crawl while we get to know the folks, and then takes off again in a rocket halfway through. Credit goes, though, to the fact that it does take off again.

Readers of Birdman will want to pick this one up to close the book on the unanswered questions left from that novel (and really, when it comes right down to it, you know, deep in your gut, the answers to those questions left at the end of The Treatment); those who have not yet been introduced to Hayder will definitely want to go with Birdman first.