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.).

May 15, 2013

An unsolved crime has become a thorn in the side of Det. Jack Caffery as the anniversary of the disappearance of a model named Misty gets plenty of newspaper coverage and her loudmouthed drunken mother blames Jack, who had been assigned the case, for failing to find Misty's body. So when a phone call comes in from a staff nurse at the Beechwood psychiatric unit, reporting strange happenings, patients inflicting harm on themselves, a bag full of menacing dolls, and sightings of the spectral Maude, Jack is on the case. It seems that these happenings coincide with the accidental release of an inmate with a horrific homicidal past. VERDICT Hayder's latest installment in the Jack Caffery series (after Hanging Hill and the Edgar award-winning Gone) is a creepy, twisty thrill ride that doesn't stop and will give you the shivers if you dare to read it at night. This is another winner.--Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD

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