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Mo Hayder

Biography

Mo Hayder

Mo Hayder left school at 15. Gifted with intelligence and determined to shape her own future she worked as an actress in TV and film, barmaid, security guard, filmmaker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator, and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. She had an MA in film from the American University in Washington, DC, and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University, UK.

She wrote 11 crime novels under the name Mo Hayder, and her fifth novel, RITUAL, was nominated for the Barry Award for Best Crime 2009 and was voted Best Book of 2008 by Publishers Weekly. GONE, her seventh novel, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Two of her books, THE TREATMENT and RITUAL, have been made into films, and her novel WOLF was nominated for Best Novel in the 2015 Edgar Awards and is currently being adapted for the BBC.

Prior to her diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease in December 2020, she had completed THE BOOK OF SAND and the first drafts of three more books in this series of speculative fiction, from which she took her greatest personal writing satisfaction. She passed away in July 2021 as a result of MND. She lived her life as a creative artist, never afraid to challenge her personal boundaries or those set by the establishment.

She leaves behind a husband and daughter, a powerful legacy of books, and an incredible number of people who loved and admired the many facets of her diamond personality.

Mo Hayder

Books by Mo Hayder

by Mo Hayder, writing as Theo Clare - Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction

Sand. A hostile world of burning sun. Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins. In the distance, a group of people --- a family --- walks toward us. To survive in this alien world of shifting sand, they must find an object hidden in or near water. But other families want it too. And they are willing to fight to the death to make it theirs. It is beginning to rain in Fairfax County, Virginia, when McKenzie Strathie wakes up. An ordinary teenage girl living an ordinary life --- except that the previous night she found a sand-lizard in her bed, and now she's beginning to question everything around her, especially who she really is.

by Mo Hayder - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

WOLF kicks off when a vagrant --- the Walking Man --- finds a dog wandering alone with a scrap of paper with the words “HELP US” attached to its collar. He calls on Detective Inspector Jack Caffery to investigate. Caffery is reluctant to get involved --- until the Walking Man promises in exchange new information regarding the childhood disappearance of Caffery’s brother. Caffery has no idea who or what he is searching for, but one thing he is sure of: it’s a race against time.

by Mo Hayder - Fiction, Thriller

Everything goes according to procedure when a patient, Isaac, is released into the community from a high-security mental health ward. But when the staff realizes that he was connected to a series of unexplained episodes of self-harm amongst the ward's patients, and furthermore that he was released in error, they call on Detective Jack Caffery to investigate. Will the terrifying little effigies Isaac made explain the incidents around the ward, or provide the clue Caffery needs to predict what he has planned?

by Mo Hayder - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Newly divorced and penniless, Sally is desperate to support herself and her teenage daughter. Forced into a criminal world of pornography and drugs, she and her sister --- who has a crippling secret that dates back 20 years --- struggle to keep a grip on reality.

by Mo Hayder - Fiction, Thriller

Jack Caffery’s newest case seems like a routine carjacking. But as the hours tick by and his investigation morphs into a nightmare, he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn’t after the car, but the 11-year-old girl in the backseat. 

by Mo Hayder - Fiction, Mystery

Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes, but when he visits a secretive religious cult on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. While investigating a strange apparition caught briefly on film wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island, so deformed it can hardly be human, Oakes crosses a border of electrical fencing, toxin-filled oil drums, and pigs’ skulls to infiltrate the territory of the group’s isolated founder, Malachi Dove. The violent consequences of Oakes’s transgression are so catastrophic that it forces him to question the nature of evil and to face a terrible reality: Was Dove responsible for one of the bloodiest crimes Scotland has seen in years? And, worse, have his actions set into motion a killing machine that will stop at nothing?