Mo Hayder

Detective Inspector Jack Caffery must confront the demons of his own past while searching for the psychopathic killer responsible for the brutal murders and mutilations of five young women, all of whom had worked at a strip club.

Birdman

Aubrey Hicks

** spoiler alert **
           My April Fool's joke on myself, read this before didn't really enjoy it - read it again because I had forgotten I'd read it (that tells you most of what you need to know) ... still didn't really enjoy it. The character Jack Caffery has much promise, enough that I'll give the second book a shot, but promise doesn't make a good book.

Birdman is a flawed book, the emphasis on the horror, the shock, the depravity but without any real sense of character development, or character for that matter. Caffery as a character has promise, but his revelation at the end seemed so pat. So many years and years holding onto finding his brother's killer, and then all of the sudden he's decided he's able to move on. Blerg.

It felt like it had all the horror and grotesqueness of Thomas Harris without the solid character to back it up. We spend a lot of time with the killers, but our knowledge of their motivation or history is spotty and poorly drawn. Sadly it's the female characters, especially, that are extremely one dimensional. 

The last thing I'll say about this is that the investigation is also relatively sparse, built on Caffery's hunches mostly. Bad racist cop does bad racist things. Good, intuitive cop does good things and saves the girl who gets herself in trouble by not playing it safe.

Mo Hayder will get one more shot from me ... but only because I sense underneath this cliched novel something that could be good.

Alfredo santos

Although it's your typical serial killer story, it has great twists, good story, very graphic "scenes" and an interesting ending!.

Greenwich, south-east London Detective Inspector Jack Caffery - young, driven, unshockable - is called to one of the most gruesome crime scenes he has ever seen. Five young women have been ritualistically murdered and dumped on wasteland near the Dome. Subsequent post-mortems reveal a singular, horrific signature linking the victims. Soon Caffery realises that he is on the trail of that most dangerous offender: a serial killer. Beset by animosity within the police force, haunted by the memory of a very personal death long ago, Caffery employs every weapon forensic science can offer to hunt him down. Because he knows that it is only a matter of time before this sadistic killer strikes again ...

Sian Wadey

This has been my favourite book of the year so far and it's hard to explain why. You jump, feet first, into the murder. It's almost like going underwater, you have to take a deep breath, and it's not until you've finished that you can breathe again. Mo Hayder has a brilliant, if rather gruesome imagination, and reading the detailed descriptions of the bodies and the acts taking place, can at times make you feel physically sick. For me, that's part of the reason why I loved it. To get such a strong reaction from a book is fantastic. 
This book took me no time at all to read. At the time, I was travelling across the country and spent the whole time glued to the pages. At times it made me gasp and pull faces. I'm sure I got plenty of strange looks from other train passengers.
In the end, the person I hated most was Veronica, I won't give my reasons on here. But I cannot wait to read the next Jack Caffery book!

Santosh Singh

Too dark. Picked up after some good reviews of this author. But this is quite ordinary stuff.

Bad Girl Bex

Bloody loved it! I just had to check back after reading this that it was Hayder's first book, because it's so expertly woven together with excellent attention to detail and completely authentic characters, that it feels like the work of an old pro, not the debut novel of someone just starting out. I loved how cleverly she made me feel at one point as though she had overdone the foreshadowing to the point of making the actual perp quite obvious, only to find that it was a very deftly created ruse, designed to make me feel like an idiot for falling for it! Lol. 

I do love a bit of explicit violence and graphic detail in a serial killer thriller, so I was absolutely thrilled with the levels of sadistic gore and torture described throughout the book. Away from the vivid depictions of mutilation however, Hayder also has a knack for scene setting, with many paragraphs verging on the kind more likely to be found in works of literary fiction than the oft maligned crime genre. That, along with the huge amounts of research into the more technical aspects of forensic procedure and police protocols (which were effortlessly enmeshed within the plot, never once seeming contrived, over-explained or out of place) made this a fantastic read. 

Now I just have to go and check which book is the second one in this series, because I'm completely sold on Mo Hayder and am going to have to go and fork out for every book she's written. If you love Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen, Val McDermid or Minette Walters, you will love this book.

Birdman

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