It is well established that women are happy to read novels written by men but that male readers rarely extend a reciprocal courtesy. The late Mo Hayder is a case in point, since despite the extraordinary sales of the novels she wrote before her premature death in 2021, her fan base remains overwhelmingly female. It may be that the extreme violence often found in her books (‘lurid’ would not be unfair) strikes men as a trespass on what has traditionally been a male preserve. Whatever the reason, male reviewers tended to shy away – I know that, since I was one of them.
Yet just ten pages into Bonehead, her posthumously published novel, I found myself completely drawn into Hayder’s story and the haunted creepy world it depicts. Alex Mullins is a young policewoman who, after time in London spent with the Met, has come home to Gloucestershire to work locally and live with her mother. She also hopes to shed the inner demons triggered by a terrible accident two years earlier. A coach carrying former students on a class reunion swerved off the road into deep water, and most of the occupants drowned. Alex, though injured, was one of only seven survivors, along with her close friend Aaron, who has also joined the police. What haunts Alex, and brings her back to work in the countryside, is the image of a female figure she is convinced she saw on the road just before the coach’s fatal swerve.
The novel is told unusually – through the first-person voice of Alex that alternates with the third-person viewpoint of Aaron’s mother, Maryam. She is a woman of little confidence who has married a ‘catch’, but remains convinced she doesn’t deserve him.
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