THE TORMENTS
Michael J. Malone
(Orenda, £9.99)

Malone’s readers first met Annie Jackson last year in The Murmurs, a nifty supernatural thriller in which her unwanted ability to foresee people’s deaths enabled her to solve a series of murders and almost led to her own premature demise. These disturbing premonitions are the legacy of a curse on her family made hundreds of years ago and passed down through the female line, accompanied by the constant murmuring of indistinct voices in her head, which at its worst rises to an unbearable clamour.

This very welcome sequel catches up with Annie some time later. Having become a minor celebrity after cracking the Girls in the Glen case, she’s living in a cottage near Ardnamurchan which, partly due to its remote location, calms the ceaseless murmuring. She works a few afternoons a week in a café, where the residents politely pretend not to know who she is.

During one shift, however, she foresees the death of a young lifeboatman but doesn’t give him a sufficiently explicit warning (not that anything would have averted his fate) and all the good will the local people have for her evaporates in an instant.

With one attack already made on her home, an appeal from her Aunt Chrissie to help locate her missing son Damien comes at just the right time. It gets Annie away from the angry locals and teams her up once again with her amiable twin brother Lewis for another round of amateur investigation.

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Woven into the main story is another strand involving two young people, Sylvia and Ben, at a “special” school in the Borders in the 1960s, where they fall under the malign influence of teacher Phineas Dance, who has a pentagram hidden under a rug in his office and belongs to a very sinister cult.

Their aim is to resurrect the ancient succubus the Baobhan Sith, and Dance grooms the teenagers into loyal members of his Order who devote themselves to its objective right up to the present day.

After all these years, the time has come for their lives to intersect with Annie Jackson’s. She starts seeing visions she’s never had before, of a woman in green beckoning to her, and feels irresistibly drawn to a house near Girvan. Whatever’s going on, she’s been selected for a very specific purpose.

(Image: Orenda)
Malone has written mysteries, psychological thrillers and straight crime, but it’s in this gothic vein that he really seems to excel. Singularly good at evoking creepiness, he can infuse conspiracies and missing persons investigations with the darkness of ancient, powerful forces, leaving just enough ambiguity for us never to be quite sure what’s real and what is just the product of his characters’ imaginations.

From the circumstances of Annie’s adoption and long period of amnesia, to say nothing of the distress caused by the murmurs and the visions, to the way Sylvia and Ben are taken as children and turned into murderous zealots by Phineas Dance, anxiety and trauma permeate every corner of the book. The fact that the Girvan location allows for numerous references to the cave inhabited by Sawney Bean and his cannibal family underlines the dark, perverse mood.

As their paths begin to converge, it becomes apparent how skilfully Malone has woven the two strands together, and what slender but unbreakable threads bind them to each other. It’s a book to savour. And, as in The Murmurs, a story that begins with a palpable mood of tension and unease gathers pace so much in its final third that it becomes almost impossible to put down.