Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes, but when he visits a secretive religious cult on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. While investigating a strange apparition caught briefly on film wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island, so deformed it can hardly be human, Oakes crosses a border of electrical fencing, toxin-filled oil drums, and pigs' skulls to infiltrate the territory of the group's isolated founder, Malachi Dove. The violent consequences of Oakes's transgression are so catastrophic that it forces him to question the nature of evil and to face a terrible reality: was Dove responsible for one of the bloodiest crimes Scotland has seen in years?
When a vagrant - the Walking Man - finds a dog wandering alone with the words 'HELP US' written on its collar, he's sure it's a desperate plea from someone in trouble and calls on Detective Inspector Jack Caffery to investigate. Caffery has no idea who or what he is searching for, but one thing he is sure of: it's a race against time. Meanwhile, the Anchor-Ferrers, a wealthy local family, are fighting for their lives in their remote home ten miles away. Two men have tricked their way into the house and are holding the family for ransom. Yet as the captors' demands become increasingly bizarre and humiliating, it becomes clear that this is more than a random crime - it's a personal vendetta.
I believe, from what I can hear, that either my daughter or my wife has just been attacked. I don't know the outcome. The house is silent.
Fourteen years ago two teenage lovers were brutally murdered in a patch of remote woodland. The prime suspect confessed to the crimes and was imprisoned.
Now, one family is still trying to put the memory of the killings behind them. But at their isolated hilltop house . . . the nightmare is about to return.
Nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Even more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed. DI Jack Caffery has been newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. He and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a young man who has recently disappeared. Their search leads them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where one of Africa's most disturbing rituals may be making an unexpected appearance.
Starred review. "Readers looking for visceral thrills need look no further than this gritty English series." - Publishers Weekly
When the decomposing body of a young woman is found, the wounds on her wrists suggest an open-and-shut case of suicide. But Jack Caffery is not so sure. Other apparent suicides are cropping up, and they all have a connection to Elf's Grotto, a nearly bottomless network of flooded quarries just outside the city. Caffery begins to suspect a shadowy and sinister predator, someone - or something - that can disappear into darkness and slip into houses unseen. Working alongside Caffery is rough-and-tough police diver Flea Marley, but while pursuing her investigation, she stumbles upon something far too close to home that no one - not even Caffery - can help her face.
Starred review. "Hayder captures the claustrophobia of Flea's dives in unsettling detail and continues to build on her two damaged heroes." - Publishers Weekly
Jack Caffery's newest case seems like a routine carjacking, a crime he's seen plenty of times before. But as the hours tick by and his investigation morphs into a nightmare, he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn't after the car, but the eleven-year-old girl in the backseat. Meanwhile, police diver Sergeant Flea Marley is pursuing her own theory of the case, and what she finds in an abandoned, half-submerged tunnel could put her in grave danger. The carjacker is always a step ahead of the Major Crime Investigation Unit, toying with their minds in taunting letters, and ready to strike again. As the chances for his victims grow slimmer, Jack and Flea race to fit the pieces together in time.
Starred review. "Riveting... Hayder keeps the tension high... The meticulously crafted plot is heightened by Hayder's skillful evocation of mood as she summons the specter of a highly intelligent criminal who is taking great satisfaction from every parent's worst nightmare. A captivating thriller." - Booklist
Everything goes according to procedure when a patient, Isaac, is released into the community from a high-security mental health ward. But when the staff realizes that he was connected to a series of unexplained episodes of self-harm among the ward's patients, and furthermore that he was released in error, they call on Detective Jack Caffery to investigate, and to track Isaac down before he can kill again. Will the terrifying little effigies Isaac made explain the incidents around the ward, or provide the clue Caffery needs to predict what he's got planned? Mo Hayder is renowned for conjuring nightmares that sink under the skin, and in Poppet she has delivered a taut, unbearably suspenseful novel that will not let readers go.
"More jittery than suspenseful, but the complications are authentic and conscientiously worked out. If this installment doesn't win new fans, it'll keep the old ones happy." - Kirkus Reviews
The Maude is outside. It wants to come in.
It wants to sit on your chest.
The mentally ill patients in Beechway High Secure Unit are highly suggestible. A hallucination can spread like a virus. When unexplained power cuts lead to a series of horrifying incidents, fear spreads from the inmates to the staff. Amidst the growing hysteria, AJ, a senior psychiatric nurse, is desperate to protect his charges.
Detective Inspector Jack Caffery is looking for the corpse of a missing woman. He knows all too well how it feels to fail to find a loved one's body. When AJ seeks Caffery's help in investigating the trouble at Beechway, each man must face a bitter truth in his own life. Before staring pure evil in the eye.
In a quiet residential area in London, a couple is discovered bound and imprisoned in their own home. Savagely battered and severely dehydrated, the worst revelation is yet to come: their eight-year-old son has been abducted. But when the body is found and forensic evidence turns the case on its head, revealing disturbing parallels to events in Detective Caffery's own past, Caffery realizes he's dealing with much more sinister forces than he'd anticipated - and finds it increasingly difficult to maintain his professional distance. As the evidence mounts and Caffery struggles to hold his own life together, the case hurtles toward a shocking conclusion.
Birdman showcases Hayder at her spine-tingling best as beloved series character Jack Caffery tracks down a terrifying serial killer. In his first case as lead investigator with London's crack murder squad, Detective Jack Caffery is called on to investigate the murder of a young woman whose body has been discovered near the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, southeast London. Brutalized, and mutilated beyond recognition, the victim is soon joined by four others discovered in the same area - all female and all ritualistically murdered. And when the postmortem examination reveals a gruesome signature connecting the victims, Caffery realizes exactly what he's dealing with - a dangerous serial killer.
One morning in picture-perfect Bath, England, a teenage girl's body is found on the towpath of a canal: Lorne Woods - beautiful, popular, and apparently the victim of a disturbingly brutal murder. Zoe Benedict - Harley-riding police detective, independent to a fault - is convinced the department head needs to look beyond the usual domestic motives to solve the case. Meanwhile, Zoe's sister, Sally - recently divorced and in dire financial straits - has begun working as a housekeeper for a rich entrepreneur who quickly begins to seem possibly dangerous. When Zoe's investigation turns up evidence that Lorne's attempts to break into modeling had delivered her into the world of webcam girls and amateur porn, a crippling secret from Zoe's past seems determined to emerge.
With the redolent atmosphere of Ian Rankin and the spine-chilling characters of Thomas Harris, Mo Hayder's The Devil of Nanking, takes the reader on an electrifying literary ride from the palatial apartments of yakuza kingpins to deep inside the secret history of one of the twentieth century's most brutal events: the Nanking Massacre.
A young Englishwoman obsessed with an indecipherable past, Grey comes to Tokyo seeking a lost piece of film footage of the notorious 1937 Nanking Massacre, footage some say never existed. Only one man can help Grey. A survivor of the massacre, he is now a visiting professor at a university in Tokyo. But he will have nothing to do with her. So Grey accepts a job in an upmarket nightspot, where a certain gangster may be the key to gaining the professor's trust. An old man in a wheelchair surrounded by a terrifying entourage, the gangster is rumored to rely on a mysterious elixir for his continued health.
Taut, gritty, sexy, and harrowing, The Devil of Nanking is an incomparable literary thriller set in one of the world's most fascinating cities-Tokyo-from an internationally best-selling author.
