Book Review: Poppet by Mo Hayder
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It’s been a good long while since I’ve read a Mo Hayder book but as soon as I picked this up, it felt like it had been no time at all. It’s nowhere near her best book but if you like Jack Caffery and Flea Marley, you’ll fall back into their stories with ease. But if you don’t know who Jack Caffery and Flea Marley are, then this isn’t the book to start with because it references lots of events from previous books in the series.
The main setting for the story is Beechway, a secure mental health facility for patients who have or who are likely to hurt themselves or others. AJ LeGrande is the senior psychiatric coordinator; he tries to treat all the patients well and not delve into the horrifying backgrounds that have seen them land in this place. But there have been a couple of unexplained deaths and the patients blame it on the Maude.
The Maude was supposedly a dwarf who worked at the site a hundred years earlier before it was turned into a mental health facility. It’s all rumours and conjecture. But the deaths, as well as some serious self-harm incidents, have AJ concerned. Against the wishes of the facility’s director, who also happens to be his girlfriend (awkward!), he asks Jack Caffery to look into it all. Because AJ thinks they have a Scooby-Doo ghost. Someone who appears paranormal but just needs to have the mask removed to reveal a real person.
While Caffery is doing his investigations, he’s also trying to wrap up an old case that implicates Flea. He’s been keeping her secrets for over a year and he’s trying to find a way out of it for her. But she doesn’t want or need his help, at least in her mind. The two stories aren’t linked at all but the old case happened two books ago, so it’s time for it to be over.
Each chapter is told from the perspective of different characters, mostly Jack Caffery, Flea Marley and AJ LeGrande but a few others are thrown in for good measure, including people involved in an old but relevant crime and the patients in the facility. For the first half of the book, I felt like AJ got way too many chapters to narrate but by the time I got to the end, I realised it was the only way for the story to be told. The downside of this is that the story doesn’t actually spend much time with Caffery and Flea. I wish there had been more of them.
I also wondered about the portrayal of the characters with mental health issues, disabilities and physical differences. I don’t personally fall into any of these categories but I wondered how those who do would perceive this book. Not the most positive representation – spooky dwarf ghost – but I guess it’s not the worst. Certainly, people like those depicted in the mental health facility exist but they seem like all too common backdrops for crime novels rather than being treated like real people.
I’ll keep reading Mo Hayder’s books because they are very readable but if you’re new to this author, start at the beginning of the series or with one of her standalone novels.
3 stars
*First published on Goodreads 30 November 2020
