Intriguing story, well told with interesting characters and a unique writing style. I really enjoyed the book and will definitely read more by Mo Hayder in the future. ( )

Poppet by Mo Hayder is the 6th books in her police series that features Jack Caffery. I found this one quite chilling featuring as it does the hunt for a deranged mental patient who has committed horrifying crimes in the past. We are also brought up to date with the relationship between Jack and Flea, a fellow detective. They have severe issues that has been affecting them over the course of the last three books.

Everything seems straight forward and by the book when Isaac Hayden is released from Beechway High Secure Unit, but then a staff member puts the pieces together and realizes that Hayden was connected to a series of unexplained injuries among the ward’s patients, some of which ended in a number of deaths. Due to his violent past, Jack Caffery is called on to investigate and to track Isaac down before he can kill again. Meanwhile Jack is still involved in searching for a missing woman even though he knows all to well that Flea will ensure she’s never found.

Mo Hayder is an author that isn’t afraid to write extremely dark stories. She writes of crimes that can easily conjure nightmares and isn’t afraid to bring in elements of horror. Poppet is not the most frightening of her books that I have read but this did have a definite creepy side to it. I wouldn’t recommend reading this book out of order, as the secondary plot has been arched over three books and wouldn’t make a lot of sense without reading the prior books. ( )

This is the 6th book in the Jack Caffery series, and whilst it's certainly an improvement in quality from Ritual/Skin & Gone, it still doesn't return to the exquisite level that Birdman/The Treatment reached in their combination of crime and horror.

The narrative feels a bit more disjointed than usual, and the chapters seemed shorter and more frequent in this book, but the story was able to carry these limitations in the writing reasonably well. Perhaps my increased satisfaction with this novel was related to the decrease in page time dedicated to Flea, it was more focused on AJ/Melanie, Jack and the unfolding crime. There's some developments in the extremely slow moving Jack-Flea plot and I'm wondering whether to drop the series here on a slightly higher point or continue with Wolf and risk a dip in quality as seen in Ritual/Skin & Gone.

Overall, it was a good crime novel set in the environment of psychiatric institutions. ( )

Mo Hayder's books scare the beejesus out of me, and still I cannot stop, I just enjoy the scary stuff!
This book doesn't disappoint. I got it printed as well, but this time I first listened to it to be faster while doing some crafty work, and I can really recommend it.
From the very beginning, there are two stories intertwined: one, concerning a disappeared woman, who sees Jack Caffrey involved from the start, and the other story, taking place in a mental hospital, that slowly creeps into Caffrey's line of work. I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling the book to other readers, but while I didn't guess the end, I knew that some things "were not as they seemed"... enough said! Don't read it at night if you want to sleep well :) ( )

Enjoyable story, but when you finish it you realize you could have removed the inspector from the book entirely and it would have had the same ending. It was also a bit annoying, for someone that didn't know this was an ongoing series, that something from the previous book was getting resolved in this one(but again, it resolved itself without Caffery doing much) ( )