Poppet

Starred review from March 25, 2013
In Edgar-winner Hayder’s enthralling sixth thriller featuring Det. Insp. Jack Caffery of the Bristol Major Crime Investigation Team (after 2010’s Gone), Caffery stubbornly clings to a missing person case as he gets drawn into fatal abuses at Beechway High Secure Unit, a psychiatric hospital. Jacqui Kitson is pressing the police to find her grown daughter, Misty, a model who disappeared a year-and-a-half earlier. Caffery knows what happened to Misty, but he’s protecting someone, an unusual stance that plays out in tantalizing fashion. Strange events are unfolding at Beechway, where belief in a monster called “The Maude” is growing among increasingly hysterical patients and staff members. A patient who goes missing is eventually discovered buried nearby. Another dies after self-harming, while a third gouges out his eye. When a severely disturbed patient is released, the terror spreads from hospital to village. Hayder’s sharply drawn characters, major and minor, and her psychological acumen combine for a frightening and convincing read. Agent: Jane Gregory, Gregory & Co. (U.K.).

July 29, 2013
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.