Mo Hayder is the author of some of the most genuinely terrifying and brilliant thrillers out there: the ending of Hanging Hill lingers in a dark corner of my brain, while her tortured, tragic detective Jack Caffrey and the horribly disturbing crimes he takes on are unforgettable (if you’ve not read the books, you may have seen him in the recent adaptation of Wolf). Hayder died in 2021, and Bonehead (Hodder & Stoughton) is a surprise final novel. It goes to places as blackly nightmarish as ever. Our protagonist is Alex Mullins, a police officer in Gloucestershire who, as a teenager, survived a coach crash into a lake that killed some of her classmates. She’s back in the village where it happened, determined to get to the bottom of the vision of a skeletal woman she believes she saw that awful night – a local legend known as the Bonehead, who brings bad luck with her. “The woman, went the story, had been a prostitute, a Gypsy, who at some point in the past century had been murdered in the park by a john and thrown into a ravine. Her face had been eaten back to the bone by rats and foxes, but her body remained, miraculously mummified, so her killer went back time and again to have sex with the faceless corpse.” Delving into superstition, rumours and tragedy in this small community, as the sense of looming menace that only this author can summon so successfully grows, Bonehead is as shocking and sinister as anything Hayder has written. It is an unexpected, bittersweet treat to be back in the hands of one of our very best crime writers.
