Books
This section contains details of Mo's published books: Poppet, Hanging Hill Gone, Skin, Ritual, Pig Island, Tokyo, The Devil of Nanking, The Treatment, Birdman. Please also visit the International Book Covers page.
The Walking Man Series
Mo Hayder
“People often ask me where I get the inspiration for my characters. Some writers are very clear about their sources: they know exactly whom a character is based on. But I’ve always been a little baffled by the question – each character I’ve written is an amalgamation of various traits borrowed from different places and quite often I can’t remember exactly who I’ve stolen from. I’ve certainly never met a person and instantly seen in them a character fully fledged. At least not until I met the Walking Man.
His name wasn’t the Walking Man of course. His name was John. But he walked, it was his preoccupation. I’d spotted him from time to time outside Bath, walking on the hardshoulders of the A roads. He was obviously homeless: he always carried a rucksack and even on the hottest days of the year he’d be dressed from head to toe in foul weather gear. Draped around his neck a bit like a Palestinian militant, was a black and white checked keffiyeh. And he was black – absolutely filthy from head to toe, as if he’d walked straight out of a fire.
One day I stopped the car (right next to the Cannard’s Grave pub at Shepton Mallet) and began talking to the Walking Man.
This was his story: he’d been in the army, but while he was posted in Northern Ireland his wife developed a romance with a man in their neighbourhood in London. When he came home on leave she ended the affair. The boyfriend, needless to say, wasn’t terribly happy. A few days after his return John opened the door one morning to accept a parcel from a courier and his life took an abrupt nose dive. The courier was the boyfriend and after handing John the parcel and getting him to sign the docket, he leaned in, threw a petrol bomb into the hallway and slammed the front door trapping everyone inside. It was like Armagh all over again: the house went up like a cinder bush and before John knew it the house was razed to the ground, his wife and his two children asleep upstairs burned to death in their beds. John’s response was fascinating: shaken to the root, heartbroken, he didn’t stop to salvage anything or speak to anyone. He just turned on one heel and began to walk. In a trance he kept going: heading for the only place he thought would save his peace of mind: the Atlantic Ocean. He told me the ocean was going to wash ‘the fire and the violence off him’. And when it had washed him he was going to start to swim. He was going to swim and swim until he reached the far shore: because that was the New World and the only place to start a New Life was in a New World.
It dawned on me fairly soon that John was insane. None of his story added up: why had the boyfriend gone to all the elaborate preparation of masquerading as a courier when he could have just knocked on the door and thrown the bomb inside, or even slipped it through the letter box while the family slept? And why had the two children and the mother still been asleep in the middle of the morning when the crime had taken place? And why did he seem to be walking not towards the west but in circles? John’s eyes wandered when he talked: strabismus, a tic common to schizophrenia sufferers. But even though I didn’t completely believe the story the Walking Man’s enormous imperative and determination stayed with me: his headlong, lemming-like rush for the West Coast, his yearning to walk and walk and walk – as if he could walk the madness out of him. That intensity, and maybe his eyes too, which were darklashed and blue - it all made me think of Jack Caffery.
I started to wonder what it would be like if the Walking Man and Jack got together. And the more I wondered the more I realised that their story couldn’t fit into one book. There was too much to explore between them. Although the Walking Man has committed a horrific crime he nevertheless is a kind of angel to Jack, and over the series – which is about 5 books in length I think - he will keep coming back to guide Jack while his own story evolves and reveals itself.”
Poppet
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.
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Listen to an extract from Poppett 2 minutes 53 seconds
Publish date: 28 March 2013 ISBN-10: 0593068165 Format: Hardback
Hanging Hill
What if you found yourself divorced and penniless? With no skills and a teenage daughter to support? What if the only way to survive was to do things you never thought possible, to go places you never knew existed …
These are questions Sally has never really thought about before. Married to a successful business man, she’s always been a bit of a dreamer. Until now.
Her sister Zoe is her polar opposite. A detective inspector working out of Bath Central, she loves her job, and oozes self-confidence. No one would guess that she hides a crippling secret that dates back twenty years, and which – if exposed – may destroy her.
Then Sally’s daughter gets into difficulties, and Sally finds she needs cash – lots of it – fast. With no one to help her, she is forced into a criminal world of extreme pornography and illegal drugs; a world in which teenage girls can go missing.
Two sisters intent on survival. Until one does something so terrifying that there’s no way back …
Open the book (53 pages) | Reviews
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Published: 14 April 2011 EAN: 9780593063835 Format: Hardback
Gone
Winner in the category of best novel for the 2012 Mystery Writers of America, Edgar® Awards
In Gone, Hayder's seventh novel, and the fifth to feature her popular murder detective Jack Caffery, the scene is set in early winter, in the West Country. Caffery is brought in to interview the victim of a car-jacking. So far, so routine. But this incident is different. This time the car was taken by force, and on the back seat was a passenger, an eleven year old girl. She is still missing.
Before long the jacker himself starts to communicate directly with the police, and Caffery knows this wasn't a one-off. He will strike again - another car with another child on the back seat. Even scarier still is the fact that the jacker seems to be one step ahead of the police, no matter how quickly they pursue him.
In a race against time, Caffery must track and find his criminal, before more innocent victims become another notch on the dashboard...
Open the book (38 pages) | Reviews
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Published: 4 Feb 2010 EAN: 9780593063811 Format: Hardback
Skin
When the decomposed body of a young woman is found by near railway tracks just outside Bristol one hot May morning, all indications are that she’s committed suicide. That’s how the police want it too; all neatly squared and tidied away.
But DI Jack Caffery is not so sure. He is on the trail of someone predatory, someone who hides in the shadows and can slip into houses unseen.
And for the first time in a very long time, he feels scared.
Police Diver Flea Marley is working alongside Caffery.Having cometo terms with the loss of her parents, and with the traumas of her past safely behind her, she’s beginning to wonderwhether their relationship could go beyond the professional.
And then she finds something that changes everything. Not only is it far too close to home for comfort – but it’s so horrifying that she knows that nothing will ever be the same again.
And that this time, no one – not even Caffery – can help her …
Open the book (37 pages) | Reviews
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Published: March, 2009 ISBN-10: 0593048075 ISBN-13: 978-0593048078
Ritual
Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, 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. Yet 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.
Newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol, DI Jack Caffery is attempting to leave behind his failed personal life in London. Still haunted by the disappearance of his brother, he is looking for a man recently released from a high security prison, a man who sleeps rough and walks the country roads as he re-lives the memories of a terrifying crime.
Caffery and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a boy who has recently disappeared. Their search for him, and for his abductor, lead them into the darkest recesses of Bristol’s underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others ...
RITUAL has been nominated for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award 2008 is the opening novel in Mo Hayder’s Walking Man Series
Read an extract | PDF Article: 'The Problem with Caffery' | Reviews
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Published: March, 2008 ISBN-10:0593056418 ISBN-13:978-0593056417
Pig Island
Nominated for a CWA dagger
Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes. A born sceptic, he believes everything has a rational explanation. But when he visits a secretive religious community on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. Questions mount: why has the community been accused of Satanism? What has happened to their leader, Pastor Malachi Dove? And perhaps most important, why will no one discuss the strange apparition seen wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island? Their confrontation, and its violent and bloody aftermath, is so catastrophic that it forces Oaksey to question the nature of evil, and whether he might not be responsible for the terrible crime about to unfold.
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Published: April, 2006 ISBN:0593049713
Tokyo / The Devil of Nanking
Nominated for three CWA dagger awards
British student, 'Grey', is obsessed with a past she cannot understand. She comes to Tokyo following rumours of a rare piece of film footage shot during the notorious Nanking Massacre in 1937. The film, if it exists, has been lost for decades. Only one man can help: Shi Chongming, now a visiting professor at the prestigious university of Tokyo , is a survivor of the massacre and holds the key to Grey's search. But will he help her? Increasingly desperate in an alien city where she knows no one, Grey accepts a job as a hostess in an upmarket nightspot catering for Japanese businessmen and wealthy gangsters. One gangster dominates. An old man in a wheelchair guarded by a terrifying entourage, he is rumoured to rely on a powerful elixir for his continued health. It is an elixir that others want for themselves – at any price.
Watch Mo talk about Tokyo on 'Meet The Author'.
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Published:6 May, 2004 ISBN: 0593049691
Published:10 March, 2005 in US as The Devil of Nanking – Grove Atlantic Press. (Publisher: Grove Press ISBN: 0802117945)
Published: 4 Feb 2010 EAN: 9780553824858 Format: Paperback
The Treatment
Winner - WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award 2002
In Brixton, south London , a husband and wife are found tied up and imprisoned in their house. Badly dehydrated after suffering beatings and days without food or water, they are in bad shape. The husband is clinging to life. But worse is to come. Their young son is missing.
Detective Inspector Jack Caffery of AMIT is called in to investigate the abduction of the little boy. When the child's body is found Caffery knows from the nature of the attack that his considerable investigative skills will be sorely tested as he attempts to unravel the motive and sequence of events. As Jack digs deeper, as he discovers that a tragedy in his own past is indirectly connected to the murder, and as he attempts to hold his own life together in the face of ever more disturbing revelations about both the past and the present, the real nightmares begin
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Published:17 June, 2002 ISBN: 0553812726
Published: 8 Nov 2008 Format: Paperback EAN: 9780553820478
Birdman
Greenwich , south-east London . The Met's crack murder squad, AMIP, is called out by nervous CID detectives to a grim discovery. Five bodies, all young women, all ritualistically murdered and dumped on wasteland near the Millenium Dome.
When a post-mortem examination reveals a singular, horrific signature linking the victims, officers realize that they are on the trail of the most dangerous offender known to the force: a sexual serial killer.
Detective Inspector Jack Caffery, young, driven, unshockable, finds himself facing both hostility within the force and echoes of his past in this, his first case with AMIP. He is tortured by the knowledge of a death long ago that he might have prevented. Now, as he employs every weapon that forensic science has to offer, he knows he has only limited time before the chaotic, sadistic killer strikes again
Open the book (32 pages) | Reviews for Birdman
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Published:1 January, 2001 ISBN:0553812653
Published:8 Nov 2008 Format: Paperback EAN:9780553820461
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