Skin Hardcover - 2010

From the publisher

Author of the internationally best-selling novels The Devil of Nanking and Ritual, Mo Hayder has earned a reputation of one of the most blood-chilling thriller writers at work today. In Skin, she picks up the trail of Ritual's two unforgettable protagonists as they race to staunch a rising tide of blood in a sweltering port town. When the decomposing body of a young woman is found near the railway tracks just outside of Bristol one hot May morning, the wounds on her wrists suggest an open-and-shut case of suicide. But Jack Caffery is not so sure. Other apparent suicides are cropping up, and they all have some connection to Elf's Grotto, a nearly bottomless network of flooded quarries just outside the city. Caffery begins to suspect a shadowy predator, someone--or something--that can disappear into darkness and slip into houses unseen. Could it have to do with the shadowy creature who narrowly escaped Caffery's grasp on his last case? Or is something more sinister at work? Working alongside Caffery is police diver Flea Marley, whose relationship with Caffery seems at times to have a personal dimension. Flea takes it on herself to pursue her own investigation and returns again and again to Elf's Grotto, but then she stumbles upon something far too close to home for comfort, and no one--not even Caffery--can help her face it. Skin is a penetrating dissection of family, friendships, and the evil that can tear them apart--or bind them together. Devious and disturbing, it introduces one of Hayder's most horrifying villains yet.