"Unleashed" by Peter Laws

This is the second Matt Hunter crime thriller; he debuted in Purged.

Matt, an ex-vicar, lectures in the Sociology of Religion. His policeman friend Larry asks him to advise n a case in which a teacher has been mauled to death by a dog, trapped in a cupboard, whilst being 'protected' by many religious symbols. The teacher, Steph, was involved with a poltergeist when she was a schoolgirl in the town, with her mates Kassy and Jo and Rachel, and Rachel's little sister Holly, who committed suicide. Is this a case of demonic possession? Is someone hunting witches? Or is it related to historic child abuse? Matt investigates in a tale of demons and seances, a spooks and rabbits that go bump in the night, leading to a climax underground.

A well-written cross between a horror and a thriller and a murder-mystery. No, I didn't work out whodunnit.

Laws has a good line is great descriptive lines:

• "A couple of decades ago she was the little pigtailed firework running around here, in cheap clothes even then." (C 1)
• "They'd met on Tinder three months ago, where he'd described himself as 'an entrepreneur wrapped in a mechanic's body'."
• (C 1)
• "All the Finch family members were about as coordinated as a kite in a tornado." (C 1)
• "Our sense of morality springs from little more than the current consensus of the human tribe." (C 2)
• "Let us learn to find the inherent beauty of an essentially incoherent universe." (C 2)
• "One of the top reasons to buy a kid a pet is so that it will die." (C 3)
• "Those boys who kept wandering past them, gawping at their curves like preprogrammed lab mice." (C 9)
• "The overflowing bin with its merry troupe of dancing flies." (C 10)
• "A tree, stroking softly with its fingernails." (C 10)
• "His skin was plague-victim pale." (C 26)
• "Biscuits were the truth drug for Christians everywhere." (C 26)
• "Funny how it's the cheap furniture that often has the most memories. Because you have to build them at home and you need others' help and you don't always get it right. Maybe there was a lesson in that." (C 46)

A great, page-turning read. February 2019; 442 pages