My early childhood was spent in Germany and I recall being lifted on my father's shoulders in Hamelin among the cheering crowds to catch a glimpse of a piper on stilts dressed in colourful medieval clothes. As far as I remember the children who followed that entertainer returned home. In Helen McCabe's Piper the tale is deeply chilling as the storyline follows a timeless entity, who may have lured children from their homes for the 1212 Children's Crusade, and more young ones later to former Eastern Europe. The story picks up the outrageous Piper in 1988 Romania. Mysterious and disastrous rituals by young women with a stranger in an isolated community are investigated and the culprit is thought to have died. However, he seems to have re-appeared in New Hampshire, where he sets to work captivating the women and young children of a family. All that is, except a disabled mute teen, who recognises the dangers.Because the novel is split between events in Romania and the US the reader is treated to contrasting yet very believable environments. Maybe the brooding mountain cemetery in Transylvania and the shiny hot Sunny Mead in New Hampshire are clichéd milieu. Even so, the characters grip you and take you deep into their souls so that the awful experience of those victims in Romania travel horrifically, yet more under your skin, to the American sunshine. Suddenly, with the 'storm crouching over the lake', the cliché evaporates.Many mistakenly take the legend of Hamelin's Pied Piper as an amusing tale but the dark side with respect to paedophilia, abduction and mass hysteria are in sharp focus in Piper. How Diep Koppelberg, the pied piper, captivates his victims with hallucinations and illusion remains a mystery as is why he chose Sunny Mead. Not that I subscribe to the need to know everything in a book, so such details don't spoil the narrative for me. Helen McCabe has a keen observational eye and an easy-to-read style as typified by such descriptions as: '(the toad's) golden eyes looked lazy like it had been watching too much television.' I am surprised to find the Point of View so easily head-hopping sometimes twice a page making it more difficult to engage strongly with a character. Having said that it is easy to have empathy with Pip, the mute disabled boy, who has an acerbic attitude problem and is extraordinarily well portrayed. By far the best scene for me is chapter nine, at the dinner table, where the family invite the new music teacher aka the pied piper. Little did the family and other guests know that the playful flautist was driving them insane. The madness is temporary but boy it is terrifically crafted. Be careful how you read it or you'll find sanity slipping...For me the book ends at Chapter 15 with a satisfying denouement in New Hampshire, yet leaving an escape hatch open for the future. After that is a kind of two chapter return to Romania, a tidying up process that is an anticlimax, especially considering there is a sequel on its way.For any reader who enjoys interpretative explorations of legends, this is a must read.