The Nameless

For at least half of this book, I enjoyed the leisurely pacing, and the vagueness of whatever worldwide, horrific movement was taking place. Campbell, however, has a problem paying things off.

The book opens in 1940 with a death row scene featuring a man posing as a psychiatrist and an inmate who struggles to explain why he had to return years later to finish torturing a woman he almost killed at his first attempt. "I just needed to finish," he says. Thirty years later, a woman in England learns both that her husband has died in Saudi Arabia and that her pre-school-age daughter has been stolen from her school. Ten years later this same woman gets a phone call from her daughter.

There are other missing children, a traumatized teenager who has escaped from a cult, and -- what Campbell does best -- a range of characters drawn from the London literary scene of the 1980's, a scruffy underground newspaper where the editor hasn't quite lost his Oxford accent, and an array of policemen and wait staff from London to Glasgow. There are a couple of scary bits, but if the cult is of "The Nameless" most of what they do and the supernatural elements they employed remain simply "the inadequately explained."

Again, I am baffled by Campbell's reputation and the praise these books have received.