Show 19: more about the popular crime novelist, and her new novel, Ritual
On the face of it, Mo Hayder might seem an unlikely novelist. She left school at fifteen and subsequently worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. Were all that experience not enough, she also has an MA in film from The American University in Washington DC and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University UK. She lives in Bath with her daughter.
Her debut novel, Birdman, was published in January 2000, and was an international bestseller. Her second novel, The Treatment, was also a Sunday Times bestseller, and won the 2002 WH Smith Thumping Good Read award. Her third novel - Tokyo – was also a Sunday Times bestseller, and was published in May 2004 in the UK. It won the Elle magazine crime fiction prize, the SNCF Prix Polar, and was nominated for three Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger awards. Her fourth best seller, Pig Island, was published in April 2006, while her fifth book, Ritual, is the first of The Walking Man series, and is released in March 2008.
Ritual
Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Yet more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed. DI Jack Caffery has been newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. He and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a boy who has recently disappeared. Their search for him - and for his abductor - lead them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others ...