One of us will be dead by morning

*Starred Review* After a five-year gap, British horror maestro Moody returns to his popular Hater series. The fourth installment (which takes place roughly concurrently with the first, 2006's Hater) is mostly set on a small island where a group of colleagues are having one of those corporate team-building getaways. It's going OK until one of the group dies in a fall from a cliff. Then the boat scheduled to return them to the mainland is late; bodies of children start washing up on the shore; and, when the boat finally turns up, it's wrecked and littered with bodies. Then violence breaks out on the island, and the group plunges into anarchy and paranoia, fueled in part by radio news stories describing how people all around the world are changing into ultraviolent creatures that are already being called Haters: Who on the island is about to change? Who has already changed? The book ends on a cold, brutal note, as in a logical progression of the story begun in Hater the line between the Haters and the uninfected has become so thin that it's virtually nonexistent. Moody really knows how to write creeping, claustrophobic terror, effectively sneaking up on his readers and, finally, scaring the life out of them. Top-drawer horror.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist

Moody launches a saga in the world of his Haters series (Dog Blood) with this grim tale of endless disaster. A group of coworkers are more than ready to conclude team building exercises on the remote island of Skek, off the coast of England, and head home. Then they find a boat crashed on the rocks that's full of dead and injured school children and their minders. It's soon clear that someone is loose on the island, bent on murder. When the island's owner arrives from the mainland, he reports that people dubbed Haters are erupting in mindless violence without warning. Cut off from help, short on resources, and high on paranoia, the two dwindling groups, who can't even trust each other, must find a way off the island despite the promise of death waiting for them everywhere else. Moody covers the familiar ground of zombie thrillers, but these aren't zombies: they're living people who have an insatiable need to kill, uninhibited yet fully capable of forming thought. The tense narrative is relentless and gory, with more than a touch of nihilism. Readers who seek a glimmer of hope in their apocalypse may want to look elsewhere. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Literary. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.