"Rattle" by Fiona Cummins

An audio book.

Clara (who has her middle 3 fingers missing) is abducted by the bone collector, a man whose family through generations has been collecting unusual bones. She's 5. Her mother had been against her having an operation. Her father, a doctor, has solicited under-age women in the past.

The man keeps Jakey under observation, awaiting an opportunity to abduct him too. His bone disease means that his life expectancy is 36 years. His father Erdman has been a journalist on a Psychic magazine. He gets sacked, assaulted by a gang, gets himself to hospital and disappears. His twin brother died about 30 years before of the bone disease than Jakey has. His body was stolen. His wife Lilith became an orphan in childhood.

DI Fitzroy, 37, isn't making much progress. Her father, an ex-policeman moved abroad 2 years before with his new wife. She and her partner David are about to have an appointment at a fertility hospital. But David doesn't turn up. Her sister pesters her, saying that her niece wants a visit. She decides that having a child is more important than preserving a marriage.

A year before a girl called Grace was abducted, though she wasn't known to have a bone abnormality. Now it's discovered from her mother that she had an extra pair of ribs.

Lilith finds Erdman drunk in a park. Jakey is taken to hospital because his illness has flared up. His parents go there. Jakey is abducted.

The bone collector would like to cut up a live body. He uses beetles etc to remove flesh from bones. He leaves rabbit skeletons as calling cards. The police study the skeletons and contact beetle sellers, leading them to think that the culpit works in a museum. From his PoV we learn that he has an ill wife and no children.

Erdman has worked out that the criminal works in the hospital and is the man who's been following him. He tries to find son to make up for his imperfect behaviour in the past. Fitzroy works out the hospital connection too, Brian Howley has been a cleaner for 40 years. His boss knows that his father died and left him a house. Brian suspects that they're on his trail.

Fitzroy had over-reacted during the Grace case, and is being kept away from the front line. She goes to Brian's father's house. He tells her about Grace then stabs her and carries her in. Erdman watches, and goes in to save Fitzroy. The two find the skeleton of Erdman's brother. [Would Brian really be so careless? Would they really not contact the police (who are outside the wrong house)?] There's a fire. The police arrive in time.

6 months later, Erdman and Lilith are happy together and Jakey is ok. Brian escaped from the police. Clara might still be alive. Her parents have separated. Grace is dead.

[The plot isn't always convincing. The writing's best when first-person women are worrying. "rectangular-shaped" isn't good.]

Other reviews

• nonsenseshewrote (a mess ... Rattle‘s biggest issue is not knowing what genre it wants to be. It’s an everyday crime thriller, without any supernatural goings-on, that still owes half its page count to horror stories. ... two-thirds of the novel is spent setting up these strange goings on and the last third utterly forgetting about them. Two-thirds of the novel don’t advance the plot or the characters in any way, choosing to draw out these creepy moments instead which, ultimately, mean nothing since the story doesn’t have a supernatural resolution. ... Coincidence-driven’, ‘stupid-decision-driven’, ‘otherwise-smart-characters-making-terrible-out-of-character-decisions-to-serve-the-weak-plot-driven’, sure. But Cummins drives her characters with all the subtlety of a freight train.)
• bibliomaniacuk (This novel flits between crime, psychological thriller and horror; nothing is ever overstated or over sensationalised, keeping the reader completely convinced and on tenterhooks from the beginning to end.)