The queen of the British thriller Mo Hayder, author of ten shocking books since 1999 (2000 in France for the French translation of
Birdman
at the Presses de la Cité), died at 59 years of age from a neurodegenerative disease diagnosed in December last announces its publisher.
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Clare Dunkel, her real name, had experienced a chaotic course to say the least before embarking on writing.
After leaving school at 15, she accumulated all kinds of little restful jobs: barmaid, security guard, hostess in a Tokyo club ... and finally an English teacher in this Asia where she lived for many years. .
To read also: Mo Hayder: hour of the wolf
In 1999, she published
Birdman
, the first in a series of horror novels centered on the character of Jack Caffery. In this first volume, the man investigates the murder of five women: traces of punctures in the spine, mutilations in the chest, corpse of a bird in the abdomen… For her beginnings, she does not go hand in hand. dead! From the start, the reader knows the identity of the serial killer and follows the investigator gradually advancing in drug and prostitution circles. 500 pages of concrete suspense, with a grandiose finale,
Birdman
was reminiscent of
Red Dragon
, Thomas Harris' masterpiece.
Two years later, she did it again with
L'Homme du soir
, a logical sequel to
Birdman
. And Jack Caffery is still the victim of recurring nightmares in which his younger brother appears, abducted by a pedophile and never found.
It was in 2005 with
Tokyo that
she returned to the country of her formative years. The pace is different from the first two thrillers. Hayder embarks on a complex plot set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese war. The heroine is a young English girl with a troubled past fascinated by the Nanking massacres. She will meet in her quest for yakuza, an American gigolo, an androgynous creature ... Slower novel, with a disturbing atmosphere,
Tokyo
has baffled readers but was praised when it came out by some big names in the thriller like Michael Connelly, Val McDermid or Harlan Coben.
Return to his hero Jack Caffery three years later with
Rituel
, an explosive cocktail based on thriller, psychological novel, thriller and fantasy. In the process, the tireless author, publishes
Skin
. Caffery, now commissioner, is still assisted by Flea Marley, a young diver from the Bristol Underwater Brigade discovered in
Ritual
. The duo follows several cases and Hayder, expert in glauqueries adds, in the background, the frightening presence of a flayer obsessed with animal and human skins!
With
Les Lames
, in 2011, she moved away from her favorite characters to stage two sisters in a 500-page thriller of great darkness.
A murdered teenager, a mother and her daughter in danger, a gallery of ruined beings (a producer of porn movies, a drug dealer, a veteran of the war in Iraq…).
False leads in twists and turns Hayder masters his art to perfection.
In 2015, with
Viscères
, a new thriller with a poetic title, Caffery finds an old acquaintance, the Walker, a man also in search of a loved one who has disappeared.
They will have to solve the riddle of a lost dog who wears a message of appeal for help on his collar and, in his stomach, jewelry ...
In fifteen years, Mo Hayder, crowned with the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award and the equally prestigious Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library Award, adapted by the BBC, praised by his peers, has succeeded in pushing the limits of the thriller with its horrific thrillers.
She wrote a work of great originality, crisscrossed with incredible images, not necessarily intended for sensitive souls. A mix of the Big Guignol à la Thomas Harris in his
Hannibal
series
and the fantastic atmospheric thriller à la John Connolly, a talented Irish novelist. The English editor of Mo Hayder claims that the novelist had just completed under the name Theo Sand a novel totally different from the rest of her work.
The Book of Sand
, set in a parallel universe, should be released in England in early 2022.