• Fiction. By Mo Hayder. Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.Grade: B

Plot in a nutshell:In this latest from the author of the The Devil of Nanking, a smarmy journalist named Joe Oakes is called to an island off the coast of Scotland by a religious sect named the Psychogenetic Healing Ministries. The group wants Oakes to show the world that they are not Satanists and to prove that their former leader, Malachi Dove, has lost his mind.

Oakes has been picked for the job because of his reputation for debunking religious and supernatural hoaxes. But Oakes has a history with Dove that goes back decades, and Dove has made threats against the journalist. There is also videotape a tourist had taken of the island that seems to show a half-human, half-beast roaming the shore.

What Oakes finds on Pig Island and what he ends up taking from it are more frightening and gruesome than what readers of Hayder's previously twisted books have come to expect. The curse Dove has laid on Oakes will haunt him right up to the ending.

Sample of prose: "It was thin and lonely, very, very distant and I knew instinctively it wasn't human. Instead - and I got this instant picture of the rotting meat under the sewage pipe - it sounded like an animal squealing. Or howling. Pigs."

Pros: Hayder shows from the start that her reputation for gripping suspense is well founded. Read the first chapter of Pig Island and try to put it down.

Cons: There are several disappointments: You'll finish the first chapter with an expectation of things to come that never arise. There are no sympathetic characters, and the story suffers from being narrated by secondary characters halfway through. Worst of all, the surprise ending isn't worth the effort of reaching it.

Final word: Hayder proved that she knows how to tell a tale with The Devil Of Nanking. But Pig Island isn't of the same quality. I'll read Hayder's next book with a different expectation.