Mo Hayder’s Books In Order (Jack Caffery)
Mo Hayder is the pen name used by the British author Clare Damaris Bastin (aka Beatrice Clare Dunkel, or Theo Clare, 1962-2021). After a career as a model and an actress (under the name Candy Davis), Hayder sent the manuscript of her first book to several agents and quickly signed a multiple-book deal.
Her debut novel, Birdman, was published in 1999 and became an international best-seller, lauching the successful crime series about her protagonist Detective Inspector Jack Caffery.
How To Read All of Mo Hayder’s Books In Order:
Reading The Jack Caffery Series in Order
- Birdman (1999) – Detective Inspector Jack Caffery, a young, ambitious, and unflappable man, is summoned to one of the most gory murder scenes he has ever seen in Greenwich, southeast London. Five young ladies have been killed in a ritualistic manner and left on a wasteland close to the Millennium Dome. A single, horrifying signature connecting the victims is discovered during later post-mortems. Caffery quickly realizes that he is after that most deadly criminal: a serial murderer.
- The Treatment (2001) – It is found that a husband and wife are trapped in their own house. They’re battered and tied, very dehydrated. He is in danger of dying. Even worse, their small boy has vanished. Detective Inspector Jack Caffery is brought in to investigate, but he is unable to look at this fresh crime objectively because of the parallels to events in his own life.
- Ritual (2008) – Tuesday, April 9, just after noon, police diver Flea Marley seals her gloved fingers around a human hand nine feet below the surface. It’s unsettling enough that there is no body connected. What’s even more unsettling is that the matched hand was found a day later. The sufferer was reportedly still alive when both were severed, as they were done very recently. Divided Newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol is Jack Caffery. It doesn’t take long for him and Flea to determine that the hands belong to a recently missing youngster.
- Skin (2009) – Everything suggests suicide when a young woman’s decomposing body is discovered one morning next to railroad lines just outside of Bristol. The cops also prefer it that way, all squared away and tidied up. DI Jack Caffery, though, is unsure. Someone who lurks in the shadows and is predatory is pursuing him. And he feels terrified for the first time in a very long time. Accompanying Caffery is Police Diver Flea Marley. Now that she’s safely passed the tragedies of her past, she’s starting to wonder whether their relationship may go beyond business. Then again, she discovers something that alters everything.
- Gone (2010) – As Jack Caffery, a murder investigator, comes to speak with the shaken victim of a carjacking, night is falling. He finds what he hears terrifying. There was a passenger in the rear seat when the automobile was forcibly removed. a girl of eleven years old. who still hasn’t shown up. The jacker eventually begins to speak with the cops. And Caffery is convinced he’s going to take a different vehicle. And another kid.
- Poppet (2013) – The Beechway High Secure Unit patients are afraid. A number of terrifying situations have been caused by mysterious power outages. And from the prisoners to the personnel, dread has now spread. While handling the most difficult case of his career, DI Jack Caffery receives a call to investigate.
- Wolf (2014) – In a secluded area of forest, two adolescent lovers were brutally killed fourteen years ago. After admitting to the crimes, the main suspect was placed in custody. One family is still working to get past the memories of the murders. However, the horror is set to return to their remote hilltop home.
Reading The Standalone Novels by Mo Hayder
- The Devil of Nanking (aka Tokyo, 2004) – Tokyo, 1990. Grey Hutchins is chasing a fixation. She is looking for a film clip from the tragic 1937 Nanking Massacre. Some claim it was never there. Grey is positive that it exists, that it is concealed, and that it is in Tokyo. Grey finds herself on her own in a foreign city, where she works as a hostess at an exclusive club that serves criminals and Japanese businesspeople. There is only one dominant mobster, an elderly guy in a wheelchair with a fearsome entourage who is said to depend on a potent elixir for his health. Others will pay everything for this elixir.
- Pig Island (2006) – Journalist Joe Oakes spends his career dispelling supernatural hoaxes, but everything he believes to be true is challenged when he visits a reclusive religious group on an isolated island in Scotland. Oakes follows the trail of an odd monster that was briefly captured on camera and is so twisted that it can scarcely be human. He traverses electrical fence, toxic oil drums, and pig skulls to enter Malachi Dove’s area, the group’s reclusive founder. The terrible fallout from their encounter makes Oakes wonder about the nature of evil and whether he may be holding the criminal responsible for the horrific act that is going to take place.
- Hanging Hill (2011) – A canal towpath is where the corpse of a teenage girl is discovered on a picture-perfect morning in Bath, England. Detective Zoe Benedict of the police is certain that in order to solve the gruesome murder case, the department head needs delve beyond the typical home causes. However, no one is interested in hearing outrageous suggestions from the department’s outcasts. Zoe’s sister Sally, meantime, has begun working as a maid for a wealthy businessman whose strange habits are starting to seem disgusting and maybe hazardous. All the evidence points to the same conclusion as Zoe investigates the matter and Sally’s misgivings mount: there is a serious problem at the Hanging Hill residence.
Reading The Books Mo Hayder Wrote as Theo Clare
- The Book of Sand (2022) – 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. Ahead lies shelter: a shuck the family calls home and which they know they must reach before the light fails, as to be out after dark is to invite danger and almost certain death.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 …Two very different worlds featuring a group of extraordinary characters driven to the very limit of their endurance in a place where only the strongest will survive.
If you like the Mo Hayder reading order, you may be interested in the works of Ann Cleeves or Karin Slaughter.