CONSUMED

Greg Buchanan 

(Orion, £16.99)  

Sixteen Horses, the debut thriller by Borders author Greg Buchanan, made such a stir that it’s now being adapted for TV, and one of its leading characters, Cooper Allen, has been carried over into this follow-up.

Seemingly intent on outdoing its predecessor’s murky tone, Consumed often feels less like a detective story than folk horror, or the chronicle of a descent into madness. At all times, it’s ominous, paranoid and unsettling.

It begins with the death of elderly photographer Sophie Bertilak, who collapses in her garden in the rural town of Lethwick and is eaten by her pet pigs. Her death appears to be a ghastly accident, though inside the house investigators find that photos have been removed from their frames.

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But the story has another beginning, back in 1964, when Sophie is given a camera for her 17th birthday and spends an afternoon taking pictures in woods near her home. A man and girl at the edge of a lake get her attention, and she snaps them without their knowledge.

The chemist developing the photos recognises the girl as Stephanie Earlsham, who has been missing for three years and after this sighting is never seen again.

Another photo taken that day, of a plastic pipe jutting out of the ground, has even more horrific implications. Sophie goes on to have a long career, but is forever defined by these two early photos.

With her death, Cooper Allen enters the story, and it’s apparent that she’s not in the best of mental health. A forensic vet who works with the police on cases involving dead animals, she doesn’t get on with her family, and her mother has arranged a weekend at a hotel in Lethwick for them to try to smooth things over.

The fact that Cooper gets called away to perform a post-mortem on two pigs, and to recover as much of Sophie Bertilak from their stomachs as possible, doesn’t go down well, and her growing obsession with the photographer’s death ensures the visit goes from bad to worse.

Cooper may only be on the periphery of the investigation, but she chases answers as though she were a detective assigned to the case, pushing her way into the lives of Sophie’s son and daughter, Matthew and Lucy, and even indulging in a spot of housebreaking.

Cooper’s difficulties in connecting with people, her preoccupation with true-crime podcasts, her admission to having once killed someone in self-defence and above all the feverish, paranoid state she’s worked herself into, all allow Buchanan to sow doubts in our minds about her judgement and her belief that she and Stephanie Earlsham are somehow linked.

However, there’s also the very real and very frightening figure of Detective Sergeant Lapis, a copper who ticks every “incel” box and appears to be stalking Cooper and enjoying living rent-free in her head. Her encounters with Lapis are terrifying, but, like much of this novel, strange and faintly dreamlike.

Everything leads back to that afternoon in 1964, fragmented flashbacks revealing more about Sophie, her family and the kidnapped girl. And it’s all evoked in the most disturbing way, Buchanan threading throughout the text feral imagery of animals eating humans and setting the present-day sections in a Lethwick suffering rainfall of Biblical proportions.

 Its uniquely ominous atmosphere, drawing freely from horror and summoning up a sense of weirdness that often verges on the hallucinatory, gives Consumed a compelling quality that stands out in a crowded genre. Stylish and unsettling, Buchanan is forging a path through crime fiction that’s all his own, and it feels like he’s only just begun.