Mo Hayder

Mo Hayder, born Clare Damaris Bastin (1962-2021), was a British crime novelist known for pushing the genre toward genuinely disturbing extremes of violence and psychological horror. Before writing novels she worked as a model and actress under the name Candy Davis, then spent years abroad in Japan and the US, working as a teacher, nightclub hostess, and filmmaker -- experience she drew on directly for her second novel, Tokyo (2004), set partly in the Japanese hostess-club world.

Her main body of work is the seven-novel Jack Caffery series (2000-2014), following a Bristol detective's obsessive search for his missing brother alongside a run of extraordinarily graphic murder investigations; Gone (2010) won Hayder the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She also wrote four standalone thrillers, including Pig Island (2006) and Hanging Hill (2011).

Hayder died of motor neurone disease in July 2021. Two books appeared after her death: Bonehead (2024), a standalone crime novel completed before she died, and The Book of Sand (2022), a speculative thriller published under a second pen name, Theo Clare, that she used for work distinct enough from her crime fiction to be catalogued separately. Her novels have sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.