Poppet: Jack Caffery series 6 - Hardcover

Mo Hayder

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593068165 ISBN 13: 9780593068168

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2013

Synopsis

Mo Hayder has for years been a master of chilling, seamlessly-plotted thrillers that keep the reader glued to the page long after lights out, and fresh off of winning the Edgar Award for Best Novel for Gone, Hayder is at the top of her game. Her latest novel, Poppet, is Hayder at her most terrifying: a gripping novel about the search for a dangerous mental patient on the loose.

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 realize that he was connected to a series of unexplained episodes of self-harm amongst 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.

About this title

About the Author

Mo Hayder has worked as a filmmaker, Tokyo nightclub hostess, and English language teacher. She is the winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Novel for Gone and the 2011 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award for outstanding body of work. She is also the author of Birdman, The Treatment, The Devil of Nanking, Pig Island, Ritual, Skin, and Hanging Hill. She lives in England.

From Publishers Weekly

Hayder's new thriller, book six in her series featuring Det. Insp. Jack Caffery, finds the London homicide cop haunted by the events of a previous case. Perhaps because of this, the novel focuses on a second protagonist, AJ LeGrande the newly minted head nursing coordinator at a high-security psychiatric hospital in Bristol, who is beginning to suspect that the facility's patients have been tormented and brutalized by a former patient. Both Caffery and LeGrande are rich, conflicted characters, and as the plot shifts from one to the other, the narration provided by Steven Crossley, though remaining coolly objective, changes in suitably subtle ways. His description of AJ's workspace has a moody, ominous quality, darkened by the presence of a rumored ghost, and patients such as a chillingly addled inmate called Monster Mother. Le Grande's home life is described with a brighter tone; he lives in a cottage with a beloved dog and a half-Jamaican aunt who cares for him. On the other hand, Crossley uses consistent, darkly terse narration for Caffery's sections of the book, lightened only slightly by the interplay with his assistant, Flea Marley. Eventually, LeGrande convinces Caffery to become fully engaged in the grim criminal doings at the hospital. And at that point, the narration quickens and becomes increasingly purposeful as the book races to its satisfying conclusion. An Atlantic Monthly hardcover. (Apr.)

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0593068165
• ISBN 13: 9780593068168
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400