The Hundredth Man Jack Kerley HarperCollins £10.00 Rel: May 2004 Reviewed by L. J. Hurst

People get their pleasures in the strangest ways, so when pathologist Alexander Caulfield discovers a long tube in the lower intestine of the latest corpse he assumes that he has someone who has died in a self-induced pleasuring. That this was no death in ecstasy he discovers as the stick bomb explodes in his hand. Was this someone who intended to come rather than go with a bang? Or had the victim some friend with a grotesque sense of humour? Dr Caulfield, pensioned off, will never find out. His name will remain only as a warning mentioned at the opening of Mobile, Alabama's new morgue.

Dr Caulfield's missing fingers are as nothing to the missing head of a corpse found in the park. Things cannot be normal and the PSIT team is called in - two detectives with psychological training. Carson Ryder, our narrator, is one of them. Soon Carson is hearing voices - bawlings out overhead in the corridors of the morgue, condemnatory bosses, strange tattoos being read into the autopsy record, and stranger telephone calls. Those telephone calls seem to come from his late mother, his murdered father, but they are voiced by his brother in an asylum.

Nothing is what it seems. Ryder cannot understand why the chief pathologist should berate the new intern until he tries to get closer to the youngster and finds she is an alcoholic. He cannot understand why he needs to use trickery to enter the next crime scene to involve a headless corpse, or why his department gives him good then bad then good PR, until he discovers what internal politics requires.

On the other hand, those close to him cannot understand why, when they examine Ryder when he winces, they find serious burns on his body.

Mixed with all these elements - breaking into Ryder's narrative - is another voice. The voice of someone who wants to remove his mother from his body. The voice of "Mr Cutter". The voice, perhaps, of the serial murderer. The voice of someone who wants someone to talk to him and supplies the dialogue they will speak.

This is Jack Kerley's first novel - it comes with an enormous back-story. Ryder himself is not dysfunctional but he owes much to people who cannot be allowed into society - his relationship with his brother is like that of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector. The professionals about Ryder are hyper-controlling, self-deceiving, deceived; and all these things ultimately permeate both home and work. The future threatens to be hardly better than the past: to understate the issue, "Mr Cutter" is the product of an unfortunate upbringing. There are few children, fortunately, in Ryder's world, but there seems to be little that would protect them from another cycle of deranged killing in the next generation. Ryder can only go back to his house on the bay and swim his miles, feeling the uncleanness wash from him. For the reader, though, it oozes through the sweat in the hot damp south. Maybe Kerley's next novel is growing there now. Ryder will find more southern grotesque gothic.