Gone (Jack Caffery Book 5)

Bristol, UK, is in the southwest of England. Jack Caffery is a senior member of Bristol's elite major crimes investigation unit, and one of the best according to the men and women who work for him. This is the fifth book in a series featuring Det. Caffery by Mo Hayder. I have not read the other four, but this novel can stand on its own.A car jacking, while a mom was putting her groceries in the boot of the car. She was abruptly pushed aside by a man in a Santa Claus mask, who opened the driver's side door and sped away. The problem, her daughter was in the back seat! Det. Caffery is trying to convince himself that this will end with the child found very quickly. However, one of his colleagues in the head of the Avon and Somerset underwater search unit, Sergeant Flea Marley, tells him that this is the third such car/child jacking. She had reported the first two as a sequence to her superior who had not much interest in the cases.Caffery knows in cases like this that the longer the child is missing, the more negative the outcome. The carjacker starts taunting the police. Then another car/child jacking occurs, and it becomes clear that this criminal is very clever and is way ahead of the police at every step.Sergeant Flea Marley has the kind of energy we can only dream about. She runs miles to work off that energy. And, to top it all off, she loves danger. She has a gut feeling she knows where the kidnapper may be, and she goes to that area to hunt for herself. This person may know where she is and may very well know the secret she carries with her.This novel shows how well researched the author is as she went into the world of police work and diving specialties. The characters are so well drawn out and intelligent. She give us insight into the world of these parents who have lost their children and don't know whether they are dead or alive. One of these characters, is Walking Man, a man of wealth who has given up his business to walk the UK, in search of the killer of his daughter. He walks the earth, camps at night and Caffery has befriended him. Their conversations give us insight into each of their characters. The Walking Man, however, for me, does not seem to fit into this realistic world of crime.I was able to guess the kidnapper not too far into the book, but it did not destroy the tale. The writing and characterization kept me engrossed until the final paragraph.Recommended. prisrob 02-16-11 Birdman The Treatment

Mo Hayder can write edge of your seat plots but she seems to have a problem writing sympathetic characters. The novel is best when it focuses on Detective Jack Caffery. Flea Marley is back but at least she isn't the only one carrying the idiot ball in this novel. She passes it between the parents and other officers in the book. It shouldn't be hard making your victims likable when they're kidnapped children and their parents. If my children were kidnapped, I wouldn't argue with the police about handing over evidence but inexplicably these parents do. Don't get me wrong. The idiot ball can be useful in progressing a narrative but in this case it serves no purpose. The character flaws make them annoying rather than complex. It's sad when the kidnapper/killer is more sympathetic than the victims. And what was the point of Wellard casually dropping the n-word? It would infuriate me if a coworker used that language around me but Flea shrugs it off because Wellard doesn't see color? Flea remains a story killer in this novel. The book would get interesting and then you'd have to endure her stupidity for a chapter which wouldn't have been so bad had it not been boring. And please don't get me started on the "psychic" connection Flea shared with Caffery at the end. The book went on for several chapters more than it should have but the resolution seemed implausible. It wouldn't have been so bad had it explained some of the why and how things happened but nope. Instead you get Flea telepathically communicating to Caffery. Mo Hayder used to be one of my favorite authors but I'm losing patience with her writing.

Someone is taking young girls. He runs up as their mothers are about to drive off in a Santa mask and takes the girl along with the car. So far, four girls have been taken with no real progress being made on the case. He released two for reasons of his own, but the others are missing, their parents in agony.Detective Jack Caffery heads up the case. This one is personal to him, as his own brother disappeared thirty years ago and was never found. It drove Caffery into police work and makes him the haunted, driven man that he is. That makes him a successful detective while it takes its toll on his body and spirit.One of those searching for the girls is Flea Marley, a police diver who heads up the search and rescue team. She has a feeling about an abandoned canal, part of which is a tunnel, that is near where one of the parents' cars is found. The police mount an intensive search but nothing is found and Flea is chastised for wasting resources on a hunch. Her next hunch takes her on a solo search as she doesn't want to be wrong again and soon she is also in trouble.The case progresses slowly and it seems the kidnapper is always one step ahead of the police. Jack even consults a strange figure, The Walking Man, who has walked the countryside for years and seems to always know something or have a way of framing problems that stirs Jack's instincts. The Walking Man also lost a daughter many years ago and searches constantly for clues about her fate.This is the fifth in the Jack Caffery mystery series. Readers will be entranced by Hayder's involved plotting and the views into the detectives' motives and problems. The plot twists are exciting and come as a surprise to the reader. This is one of the best detective series to be found. This book is recommended for mystery readers.

After reading Ritual I somehow managed to inadvertently bypass Skin, book 4, and went straight to Gone. Honestly, don't know how it happened??!!!Ritual for me wasn't a great read but Mo Hayder is thankfully back on form with this one. What appears to be a straightforward case of child kidnapping for protagonist, Jack Caffery, turns into something much more unexpected. The perpetrator always seems to be more than one step ahead and is cleverly giving everyone the runaround and then some, which becomes increasingly both frightening and frustrating for all affected by what's going on.The book is cleverly spun out with the reader being thrown every which way. My one only complaint here is that Hayder does wander into the 'too much detail' too frequently for my liking but on the whole the book works well. Characters from the last two books reappear, Flo and The Wandering Man, but I have to say I'm not sure what The Wandering Man brings to the story other than for Caffery to go to as a cider drinking sounding board. Not an unlikeable character but not really ringing with authenticity either. It's a really pacy read to the very end and I really couldn't put it down for the last half of the book. Heart in mouth stuff a lot of the time. I did guess the perpetrator about half way through but not the reasoning, it certainly wasn't obvious.I'm really glad this book picked up for me. After reading Ritual I was disappointed and had become downhearted about carrying on, but the success of this one has woken the enthusiasm and fervour for wanting more. On to Poppet we go. Here's hoping the good twisty turny, mind bending incredible writing continues!!

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I really like Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffery novels. I did try to read ‘Tokyo’, but couldn’t take to it and left it unfinished. Here, I read these two novels back to back and it was only my positive experiences of Hayder’s previous novels, including ‘Gone’, that kept me reading Poppet.In ‘Gone’, we see quite a lot of one missing child’s mother, a strong female character, who pushes the boundaries when it comes to trying to find her daughter. In ‘Poppet’, we spend a lot of time with AJ – a fine character, but no Jack Caffery.And, isn’t that why we read serial novels, to get to know a character more and delve deeper into their 360-degree lives, as they, and we, bring more of them to each novel, each crime, each entanglement with other people. Here, however, we are one-fifth of the way into Poppet before any sign of Sgt. Flea Marley, who, Caffery believes, holds the key to solving a previous case of a missing celebrity. As before, they dance around each other, inching ever closer to … something.So, I’ll be curious, when ‘Wolf’ comes out, if this trend towards sharing the Caffery novels with other characters to such a large extent continues.If one thing binds the two novels, it is that badness – evil? – is never as obvious as we’d like, no neon arrow pointing towards the bad guy. Evil can live with us, look like us, talk like us, seduce us and we never see it for who it is. Rather, we look at those who don’t look comfortable in our landscape and try to make the person fit the crime, rather than be led by the actual crime itself.

This is an older book in the McCaffrey series by Mo Hayder. It's pretty much everything you have come to expect. Real nail-biting tension and a glimpse of the base side of humanity.The lead in this book is taken more by Flea, the specialist diver and her team. Everyone has their secrets, and McCaffrey is pretty sure he knows what Flea's is.But no one realises whose secret is at the heart of the theft of children.Mo Hayder is brilliant. This may not be as shocking as Pig Island or as nerve-shredding as Poppet but she is way ahead of any competition, real or imagined.

I can't get enough of this series. It's brilliant. I read Gone over 2 days and just had to write to say that I highly recommend this book. I think in order to get most from the books, they need to be read in order. I'm now off to order Poppet and Wolf. Thank you.

I'm a fairly new convert to Mo Hayder and think this is one of her better books, very slick and compulsive reading. Having said that, it lacks some of the raw power of her earlier books, especially  Tokyo  and  The Treatment . It's almost as if the wayward passion has gone which makes this a much smoother read, but equally makes it far more conventional and less uneasy.I adore Jack Caffery but here he's been tamed and all the menacing edginess that made him so fascinating in  Birdman  and The Treatment seems to have gone. I particularly hated the way he goes weak at the knees thinking about Flea Marley, but luckily those moments are relatively few.So this is a good, twisty-turny read but some of Hayder's uniquely disturbing touch is lacking. TokyoThe TreatmentBirdman