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.
Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted (Harvill Secker) opens as a bomb goes off in an LA shopping mall and the suicide bomber is identified as a Muslim girl from England. Sajid Khan, who works in Heathrow airport, spares the event a passing thought: “With suicide bombings … it was taken as fact that the attackers would be Islamists, and suddenly a few hundred extremists with a death wish were taken as proxy for a billion people, and as a brown man, everything became more difficult.” But then he learns from armed police who arrest him that his daughter, Aliyah, entered the US with the bomber and has now gone missing. When he is contacted by a woman who says she believes her son, Greg, is with Aliyah, Sajid is sceptical but eventually convinced, and they embark on a desperate attempt to find their children before the FBI does. Switching between the perspectives of Shreya, the FBI agent trying to prevent another bombing, Sajid and Greg, this is a race-against-time story with some excellent twists and subversions of expectations.
Kellye Garrett’s Missing White Woman (Simon & Schuster) opens with a quote from the US journalist Gwen Ifill that explains the title: “I call it the missing white woman syndrome. If there is a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that every day.” The missing white woman in this story is dog walker Janelle Beckett; our heroine is Breanna, on a romantic getaway to New York with her new boyfriend, Tyler. Tyler has been a little preoccupied with work, and at first Bree isn’t worried when she wakes late to find him gone; he’s probably in the office. But then she discovers the body of a blond woman in the foyer, and when the police arrive and start asking questions, Ty can’t be found. “A dead white woman. A missing Black man. They’d say he did it. That he was on the run.” With a social media mob on the hunt for #Justice4Janelle, and old secrets coming to light, Bree finds herself backed into a corner. This is a clever and compelling thriller packed with great characters. I read it in one big gulp.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” says Jeff Goldblum’s character, Ian Malcolm, in the film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. The line could equally be applied to Douglas Preston’s rollercoaster of a ride Extinction (Head of Zeus), in which the super-rich can take a trip to an exclusive park, Erebus Resort, in the Colorado Rockies, where woolly mammoths, Irish elk and giant ground sloths have been revived thanks to genetic manipulation. Then a couple are kidnapped at the resort, and local law enforcement are called in. Something strange is going on at Erebus, however, and the killings mount as Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Frances Cash and county sheriff James Colcord investigate. Preston is having enormous amounts of fun here, riffing off science that is already out there, nodding frequently and knowingly to Jurassic Park, and bringing his ancient megafauna to glorious life (I’d definitely take a trip to Erebus, murders aside). It’s riveting, creative and bound to be a movie. Let’s just hope Goldblum is available to help out.
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