WHEN YOU SEE PRAISE from Mo Hayder on the dust jacket of a thriller you can be pretty certain that it’s not a novel that you will want to settle down with just after dinner.

Hayder has made her name with graphic descriptions of the gruesome — her first novel featured a serial killer who sewed live birds inside his victims’ ribcages — so if she gives her seal of approval, you can bet that it’s something repulsive too.

“Repulsive”, however, sells. There’s nothing that the great British reading public likes more nowadays, sales figures confirm, than to be simultaneously scared silly and challenged to hold down the contents of their stomachs. I expect that’s why theme parks do so well.

So it is no surprise that Simon Beckett has chosen to play up the gore in publicity for his first novel, which was inspired by a journalistic visit to the so-called “Body Farm”, an American forensic school which specialises in using real corpses.

By far the most gruesome bits of The Chemistry of Death are the almost textbook-perfect descriptions of decomposition, cleverly juxtaposed with snippets of plot. We are treated to descriptions of insect larvae and maggots feasting on human remains — “a wavering brown conga line of fat yellow grubs” — before being told that this is what attracts two small boys to find the body.

This is all in the same rich vein of fatty tissue dissected by Patricia Cornwell and others, but Beckett does it well; he is a fine, if occasionally florid, writer with a good grip of both the architecture and mechanics of the thriller.

His hero is Dr David Hunter, a former forensic anthropologist — a specialist in detailed time-of-death identification — who, after the death of his family, turns away from his grim job to bury himself in a rural general practice in the Norfolk Broads.

His characterisation of village life, with the stern vicar, rundown pub and inbred, suspicious locals, tends a little towards the sterotypical, but so do some English villages even today.

When the village discovers in its midst a serial killer who specialises in mutilating young women amd adorning their corpses with body parts from slaughtered animals, the forces set in play are all too credible. And when the good doctor falls for the pretty schoolteacher, you just know she’s next on the list.

Doomed inevitability is an important element in suspense and Beckett plays the game well. It may be an overworked genre, but this is a classy debut from a welcome new British voice. I have no doubt that Beckett will find a lot more gore to disinter for our delight.

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