Description from Amazon UK

When Benet was about fourteen, she and her mother had been alone in a train carriage – and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It has been some time since Benet had seen her psychologically disturbed mother. So when Mopsa arrives at the airport looking drab and colourless in a dowdy grey suit, Benet tries not to hate her. But when the tragic death of a child begins a chain of deception, kidnap and murder in which three women are pushed to psychological extremes, family ties are strained to the absolute limit…

The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell is one of my TBRs. It’s a book I bought nine years ago from Barter Books in Alnwick. I don’t know why I haven’t read it before now as it is really good – one of the best books I’ve read this year, and one of her best standalone books. I read it this year as one of my 20 Books of Summer.

Why I enjoyed it so much is that it thoroughly gripped me and made me want to read on and on. It’s a psychological thriller, full of suspense, with several twists and turns that made me unsure how it would end. I was delighted by the final twist!

Benet’s son, James aged four dies from croup whilst in hospital soon after Mopsa, her mother with a history of mental illness, comes to visit. Meanwhile Carol, a young widow with three kids, two of them in care, is living nearby with Barry, her younger boyfriend. He adores her but she doesn’t want to marry him, content for him to do all the housework and look after Jason her two year old son when he is not being looked after by babysitters. The trouble starts when Mopsa kidnaps Jason and brings him back to Benet as a replacement for James.

The tree of hands in the title is taken from the collage on the hospital playroom wall:

On the white paper base sheet had been drawn a tree with a straight brown trunk and branches and twigs, and all over the tree, on the branches, nestling among the twigs, protruding like fungus from the trunk, were paper hands. All were exactly the same shape, presumably cut out by individual children using a template of an open hand with the fingers spread slightly apart. (page 46)

Benet found them horrible, as though the hands were begging for relief, or freedom, or oblivion. She thought there was a mad quality about them, ‘all the hands upraised, supplicating, praying.’ And she fell forward in a faint when the doctor told her James had died.

This is a dark and disturbing book about what happens to Jason, Benet, Carol and Barry. It’s well written and I could easily visualise the characters and the setting. It’s emotionally challenging and it both fascinated and horrified me in equal measure. It won the CWA Silver Dagger Award in 1984, an award given annually by the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom since 1960 for the best crime novel of the year. 

NB I’m currently reading Rendell’s The Girl Next Door because I enjoyed The Tree of Hands so much.