Bonehead

Published after Hayder's 2021 death from motor neurone disease, this is her last standalone novel, and reviewers read it partly as a coda to a career built on unsettling the crime genre from within. Police officer Alex Mullins returns to her hometown haunted by a coach crash years earlier that killed several former classmates, and by a recurring vision of a skeletal figure locals call the Bonehead. Critics highlighted Hayder's refusal to center the plot on a conventional murder, leaning instead on folk-horror atmosphere, survivor's guilt, and small-town suspicion, with forensic procedural elements used sparingly against a ghost-story backbone. It was named among the Guardian's best crime thrillers of the year, with reviewers calling it recognizably Hayder even in restraint.