Recent crime fiction | 4 June 2011

Mo Hayder has a considerable and well-deserved reputation as a writer of horrific crime novels that often revolve around the physical violence men do to women. Her latest, Hanging Hill (Bantam, £18.99), is no exception. Set in Bath, it’s the story of two estranged sisters — Zoe, a detective inspector equipped with a motorbike and a welter of scars, both physical and emotional; and Sally, the divorced mother of a teenage girl, who is struggling to cope with her vertiginous plunge from the agreeable plateau inhabited by Bath’s affluent middle classes. The narrative moves alternately between the sisters’ lives and the impact that the murder of a beautiful teenage girl has upon them. The plot encompasses sexual exploitation, drug-dealing, blackmail as well as murder.

One of the characters observes that Bath is nothing more than ‘a big village’. This may explain why everybody seems to know everyone else, but Mayhem Parva was never like this.