Snakes alive, fifty-five” goes the old Bingo call. Rhyming slang and two numbers that suggest the sinuous shapes of coldblooded animals that send a chill down most people’s spines.

It is one of those only semiirrational fears — snakes can be deadly but do not normally prey on humans unless threatened — that haunts us, familiar from “rattlers” in the Wild West to cobras rising from fakirs’ baskets to the more comfy abode of Cleopatra’s asp. But not, surely not, the English countryside?

If you think that, you don’t know S. J. Bolton. Having sprung on the thriller world last year with Sacrifice, a dark Shetland Islands tale about “trolls”, unnatural deaths among young women and a sinister male cult, she has turned her attention to rural Dorset.

Clara Benning is a shy, reticent young woman who works as a vet in a small village animal hospital, caring for injured wildlife: swans with broken wings, or badly baited badgers. So she is naturally the person a young mother calls in when she finds a snake in her newborn baby’s cradle. Not a harmless English grass snake, but our own indigenous adder, potentially lethal to an infant. Clara’s timely action saves the child, but then she discovers that a man in the village has recently died from a snakebite, a bite containing many times the poison found in an ordinary adder.

When another house is found to be full of snakes, including an Antipodean taipan, the most venomous reptile in the world, it becomes clear that something strange is going on. And why does Clara keep thinking she has recently seen a man long dead looking at her from an empty house?

As Bolton’s tale wends its dark way into a complex labyrinth involving a barbaric ritual, a burnt-down church and a dysfunctional family of ageing brothers, at the same time we discover more about Clara’s own traumatic past and the reasons for her hermit-like existence.

Involvement with a local CID inspector and a dashing but disreputable television wildlife expert — one of the world’s authorities on the deadly taipan — force Clara to confront her emotional trauma about a childhood disfigurement. And yet, just as she is beginning to tie down the loose ends of the mystery, she finds herself witness to another death for which she ends up the main suspect.

This is a clever, intricately plotted thriller, full of characters far from the conventional mould of the genre, notably her female heroines: an obstetrician in Sacrifice; a vet in Awakening. Her thrillers are set not in mean streets or corridors of power, but at Sunday services, local hospitals and nursing homes.

S. J. Bolton has elevated herself to the High Priestess of English Rural Gothic. If she carries on like this she will have worshippers in their millions.

Awakening by S. J. Bolton
Bantam, 400pp Buy the book

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