So this is the third DI Caffery novel and it did not hold what has been promised. I read Birdman and The Treatment and personally consider the latter one of the most gripping and shocking books I've ever read in this genre. However, Ritual doesn't hold up to the first two books.

Surprisingly I couldn't get into it. The story is based on Muti killings, which are occasions of murder and mutilation associated with some traditional cultural practices, in Southern Africa. More correctly known as medicine murder are not human sacrifice in a religious sense, but rather involve the murder of someone in order to excise body parts for incorporation as ingredients into medicine and concoctions used in witchcraft.
Hayder made the protagonists characters quite insignificant and halfhearted which is sad. Caffrey had a complicated character before but this time he seems to be just inanimate. Still suffering and stuck in feelings of revenge for his lost brother he's still some sort of searching for him and seems to be lost.

Flea's in a similar situation, having lost her parents in a diving accident, they both find a connection to each other which isn't really significant to the plot or deeper mentioned.

However, Hayder got a bit back to her former writing through switching to the poor boys suffering before and after loosing his hands. The descriptions is intense, similar to those in The Treatment but far away from being that graphic and hurting.

All in all I am not happy with the whole story. I caught myself putting the book to the side in the midst of the ending where the book should have been at it's highlight, just to play a cheap game on my laptop.

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this one lived on my night table for many months, having stopped and started it time after time. While I like the characters of Jack and Flea, it simply did not hold my interest.

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This is the third book in the Jack Caffery series by Hayder. I read the first two books, Birdman and The Treatment a few years ago and remember them as quite horrific and dark novels involving some very sinister antagonists. I have also read Hayder's stand-alone novels, Pig Island and The Devil of Nanking. All of her works are quite dark and I was surprised when I first found out that Mo Hayder was a woman (she died earlier this year, July 2021).

Ritual is another dark suspense novel. It starts out with the discovery of a severed hand in Bristol Harbor by police diver, Flea Marley. But where is the body from which the hand came? Caffery is brought onto the case to try to find out. He had been recently transferred to Bristol from London after the events as described in the first two novels. Caffery's investigations leads him to a dark underworld involving blood rituals and superstitions derived from Africa to fight off evil spirits. In a side story, Flea has not recovered from losing her parents in a diving accident two years earlier. Their bodies were never recovered after a dive in a deep sinkhole called Bushman's Hole or Boesmansgat in South Africa. And Caffery is still obsessed with who abducted his brother when he was young. He meets a traveling vagabond called "The Walking Man" who may be able to help him deal with this.

Overall, another absorbing novel from Hayder. Lots of twists and turns to the story and I enjoyed the interplay between Caffery and Flea. Hopefully, she will be featured in the next novels in the series which I intend to read soon.

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