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In September 2001, a man walking across Tower Bridge saw what he thought was a dummy floating in the water wearing a pair of bright red-orange shorts. As he came closer, he saw that it was a human torso. An autopsy showed that the body belonged to a boy aged between five and 10. And there was something else it revealed: the boy’s body had been drained of blood.

At the time Richard Hoskins was the senior lecturer in African religions at Bath University. “In my mid-thirties, I was very close to being a contented man,” he says. All that, though, was about to change. With their investigations going nowhere, the police called in Hoskins to see if he could help. The more he learned, the more appalled he became.

To begin with, he thought that the boy, dubbed “Adam” by the police, had been killed as part of a South African practice called “muti” — taking body parts for magic.

In muti, the body parts are often removed while the victim is still alive: “They think the parts get greater power from the victim’s screams.” However, there were a number of things that didn’t add up. The boy’s genitals had been left intact — not normal practice in muti. Also his internal organs hadn’t been removed — again, not normal practice.

But Hoskins’s suspicions of what had actually happened were just as appalling. The boy, he became sure, had been sacrificed: “Sacrifice was about a transferral of power via the spilling of blood, the life force.” He narrowed his search to the Yoruba tribe in south-west Nigeria and to a cult known as the Guru Maharaj, whose “sacred colour” was a bright red-orange.

By now Hoskins and the police team realised they were dealing with a degree of depravity they’d never encountered before — “We were now entering a different world.” Yet it was a world that Hoskins wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with. As a young man, and a committed Christian, he had gone to work in a medical centre in the Congo. While he was there, his then-wife had given birth to twin girls. One of the girls died at birth but the other appeared perfectly healthy.

One day a colleague of Hoskins warned him that the dead twin was calling to her sister — “to join her in the shadowlands”. If Hoskins didn’t want to lose his daughter, he must make a sacrifice. At the time he took no notice, but a few weeks later his daughter died. Ever since, Hoskins had been less dismissive — and more fearful — of the power of magic. His search for Adam’s killers also became a journey back into his own darkness.

Far from being an isolated incident, he realised that Adam’s murder was part of an “unspeakable new trend” whereby African children are tortured — and sometimes killed — in a bid to drive out demons. This was what happened with Victoria Climbié, murdered by her great-aunt and her boyfriend in Haringey, and with “Child B”, who survived but only at the cost of being cut, beaten, starved and having chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes.

As well as being an important book for all sorts of reasons, The Boy in the River is a remarkable one. The horror it evokes will be matched by a sense of disbelief that such appalling things are happening, now, in London.

What makes it all the more powerful is the deliberately measured manner in which it is written. Throughout, there’s a sense that Hoskins is struggling to maintain his own equilibrium, his own sanity even, as he explores what he calls, with ample justification, “the darkest underbelly of human nature”.

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