To the point

While grim Scandinavian crime novels are the in thing right now, readers would be making a mistake if they overlooked the masterful British crime writer Mo Hayder’s new novel, “hanging hill” (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Zoe Benedict and her partner Ben, both detectives on the Bath police force, are on the case when a teenage girl’s body is found on the towpath of a canal.

Her nose was broken and a tennis ball forced between her jaws so that she asphyxiated on her own blood.

Zoe’s niece, Millie, was a friend of the dead girl, Lorne, but Zoe has long been estranged from her sister Sally (Millie’s mom). Hayder develops her plot along parallel lines that soon cross.

The somewhat hapless Sally, impoverished after her divorce, works as a housekeeper for an Internet porn king who uses enslaved “talent” from Kosovo.

One day, fending off a rage-fueled attack, she murders him with a nail gun. Her boyfriend convinces her they should hack the body up and dispose of it throughout the countryside.

That they do, but even porn kings are missed when they disappear. Zoe, in particular, has an interest in him.

Lorne had been turned away from the one reputable modeling agency in Bath, but she was determined enough to take explicit photos of herself and may have shopped them around town.

Zoe’s life was misshapen by her deep resentment of her sweet and pliable younger sister, so favored by their parents, and it seems she might take some pleasure in uncovering her crime. But Hayder takes another tack, then another again, before bringing this superbly plotted tale to an end more alarming than anything that comes before.