BIRDMAN

Britain’s best actors are probably already queuing up to audition for the TV miniseries that will inevitably (and rightly) be made from this top-notch debut thriller, a deftly plotted assault on the nerves whose only serious weakness is its over indebtedness—for crucial horrendous details—on Thomas Harris’s already seminal The Silence of the Lambs.

Protagonist Jack Caffery, a streetwise and burnt-out detective inspector in his early 30s, is introduced to us as the bearer of several potentially crippling burdens, including relationships with a lover he can—t bring himself to abandon (she being a recovering cancer patient), a rival detective dedicated to putting Caffery in his place, and the haunting memory of his brother’s unexplained disappearance and probable murder, years earlier, by Jack’s grinning next-door neighbor, who seems perpetually to dare the detective to accuse him. Then, a series of grisly murders of strippers and prostitutes, whose surgically mutilated bodies are discovered near the millennium dome in Greenwich, sets Jack and colleagues in pursuit of the target, immediately dubbed the Millennium Ripper. The story zips along energetically, helped enormously by Hayder’s gift for introducing colorful peripheral characters at virtually every stage. Then a highborn, emotionally disturbed loner enters, and Hayder juxtaposes his murderous memories and fantasies against Caffery’s ongoing investigation—before springing another trap that suggests the possibility of an accomplice, and the final hundred pages gather terrific intensity, leading to a powerfully ugly finale. Genre cliches are not entirely avoided: Jack falls for the tough-but-tenderhearted girlfriend of one of the victims, and of course it is she who walks into the monster’s lair at precisely the worst moment . . . . No matter. Birdman preys on the reader’s expectations expertly, and Hayder handles her story’s (perhaps unnecessarily?) complicated time scheme with enviable assurance.

Graphic, disturbing, splendidly readable.