A family is taken hostage in their isolated home on the outskirts of a small village. One of the family manages to attach a cry for help on the collar of their pet dog and release it, but the message is compromised and the address details are lost.
Jack Caffery, through entirely unconvincing means, is given the dog and tasked with finding the source of the message. Can he track down the ownership of the dog and rescue the family before anyone dies? Will he be able to rid himself of his own personal demons? This is a Mo Hayder novel so the answer to that last one is "probably not" even before the book starts.
Thankfully Flea Marley doesn't feature at all in this book past a brief mention early on.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some truly disturbing sequences. She manages to build serious levels of tension. However, Caffery takes the crown from Flea Marley as the least convincing cop in crime fiction in this book. The supernatural overtones with the Walking Man character spoil the narrative for me. The book is otherwise based in a very gritty reality and they really don't fit in.
Some of Mo Hayder's books have relied very heavily on coincidence and character stupidity for the plots to work. I thought for a good third of this that she was doing it again, but she pulled off a quite shocking reveal that suddenly upped the stakes quite intensely.
This isn't up there with Birdman and The Treatment for me, but it is nonetheless a brutal and effective thriller even with the flaws. Now I've finished this book, I can finally get around to watching the TV adaptation.
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