Showing results by author "Kerry Wilkinson" in All Categories

Young married couple Heidi and Freddie just moved to Huntington Grove. All the neighbours see they are friendly and polite but why is one door in their house always locked? Across the street, Willow tries not to argue with her teenage daughter – even as her marriage is falling apart. And where does her husband really go each night, leaving the bed beside her cold?

Leah and her three best friends get changed into their pyjamas, eat pizza, and argue about what film to watch. They laugh together, until the early hours. But the next morning, Leah blinks open her eyes and sees three empty sleeping bags. The other girls are gone. Twenty years later. In her small hometown, still-haunted Leah has never been able to shake off the rumours and whispers. How could she have slept through it all? She must know what happened.

Twenty-five years ago: teenage Leah had a sleepover with her three best friends. By morning, the other girls were missing. This small town has been searching for answers ever since. Now it’s happened again. Three boys decide to camp in a field next to one of their homes. When dawn comes, dew glistens on their empty tents. Overgrown farmland is searched. Three distraught families are desperate for news. A mother herself now, Leah’s heart breaks as terrible memories flood back.

Someone has left a severed hand in the centre of Manchester, and the only clue Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel has to go on is CCTV footage of a woman in a long, black robe placing it carefully on the ground. With a lengthy missing persons list and frantic families wondering if the body part could belong to their absent loved ones, she has plenty to deal with - and that's before a detached finger arrives for her in the post.

When a body is found in a locked house, Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is left to not only find the killer but discover how they got in and out. With little in the way of leads and a journalist who seems to know more about the case than she does, Jessica is already feeling the pressure - and that's before a second body shows up in identical circumstances to the first. How can a murderer get to victims in seemingly impossible situations and what, if anything, links the bodies?

Long before Jessica Daniel became a police detective, Manchester was a ghost city after dark. Fear ruled, and people were afraid to be out by themselves, the notorious Stretford Slasher terrorizing its inhabitants. Now, twenty-five years on, the media are feeling nostalgic. But Jessica has a new case to worry about. Apparent strangers are being targeted in broad daylight, the attacker unworried about being caught. If only Jessica and her team could track him down...

I return home to our beautiful house on a chilly winter evening expecting to find my handsome husband Richard waiting for me by the fire. We’re still so in love, and he always takes care of me. He usually comes straight back from work. But tonight, our antique clock ticks on through the dark evening, with no sign of him. Then a knock at the door shatters my perfect life. A 12-year-old-girl, Alice from the village, has been found unconscious in the field behind our house. They say she was last seen getting into Richard’s car.

Dead bodies are piling up for Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel. Usually when a serial killer is on the loose, the pressure would be building to find the perpetrator, but the victims are all hardened criminals themselves. The national media can't believe their luck with an apparent vigilante on the streets while Jessica's new boss seems grateful someone else is doing their job for them. But things aren't so straightforward when forensics matches blood from the apparent killer to a man already behind bars.

Nicholas Carr disappeared on his 18th birthday and the world has moved on. His girlfriend has gone to university, his friends have got jobs, the police have other things to look into. But his father, Richard, is still stuck on the three fingers the police dug up from a sodden Manchester wood. What happened to Nicholas on the night he disappeared, and why did he never come home? Private investigator Andrew Hunter is Nicholas's last hope.

It started with a phone call. Just one word - ‘Jessica’ - and now Detective Inspector Jessica Daniel has a big problem. Her missing friend, Bex, called from a battered seaside payphone, and yet, by the time Jessica arrived, there was nobody there. One man claims he can help - but then he turns up on a beach stabbed to death. Jessica believes someone must be framing her. Someone who is always a step ahead. When she finds a boy whose tattoo matches Bex's, she becomes more desperate than ever for answers.

When Cameron and Eleanor Sexton arrive home to find their teenage babysitter missing, their immediate concern is for their young daughter. Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is dispatched to find out what's going on, but with all apparently well, she thinks she's been sent on a fool's errand. Soon the teenager's body is discovered in an apparently random house on the other side of Manchester.

DI Jessica Daniel is not having a good week. Her wallet's been nicked, the refurbished incident room is already falling apart, and a new football-mad constable is driving her crazy. She also has bigger things on her mind. A student's body has been dumped in a wheelie bin at the back of a university building, with a vague link to an Olympic medallist and a theory that it could have been an induction which went wrong.

When six-year-old Olivia Adams disappeared from her back garden, the small community of Stoneridge was thrown into turmoil. How could a child vanish in the middle of a cozy English village? Thirteen years on and Olivia is back. Her mother is convinced it's her but not everyone is sure. If this is the missing girl, then where has she been - and what happened to her on that sunny afternoon? If she's an imposter, then who would be bold enough to try to fool a child's own mother - and why?

Volunteering at the local nursing home is Millie Westlake’s one escape from the rumours that swirl around Whitecliff about her past. But speaking with elderly resident, Ingrid, as they play board games, Millie gets chills at her strange story about a young girl being pushed from a roof, somewhere across the valley....

Megan is unpacking in the spare room of her sister’s house when she hears the scream. Racing to the nearby woods, she is shocked to see a young woman’s unconscious body: her pink top bright against the earth, her long, dark hair wet from a nearby stream. But when desperate Megan returns with the police, all they find is empty woodland.

Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is first on the scene as a stolen car crashes on a misty, wet Manchester morning. The driver is dead, but the biggest shock awaits her when she discovers the body of a child wrapped in plastic in the boot of the car. As Jessica struggles to discover the identity of the driver, a thin trail leads her first to a set of clothes buried in the woods and then to a list of children's names abandoned in an allotment shed.

After her dad’s funeral, all Jodie wants is to clear out her childhood home as quickly as possible and get back to life with her son. But a terrifying discovery changes everything she knew about her kind, loving father. Her boyfriend Ben went missing when they were just teenagers. His parents still stare out the window desperately waiting for him to come home. So how did the T-shirt he was wearing when Jodie saw him walk away from their last date end up in her father’s attic? The search for answers leads Jodie to an old family friend who knows all her father’s secrets.

In the middle of the night, 14-year-old Samuel is woken by the sound of a terrified scream from the kitchen of his home on a quiet street. The police - finding him sobbing on the kitchen floor, cradling his mother's lifeless body - hit a dead end before the investigation has even begun: because although he witnessed the murder, Samuel is blind. But when Detective Jessica Daniel meets the boy, the way he uses just his sense of sound to accurately locate her hand to shake it convinces her that this clever young teenager could hold the key to the entire case.

Melody gazes across the rippling lake to the trees on the shore, waiting for her fiancé Evan to arrive so their family holiday can begin. Here in this cabin in a small Canadian island town, there’s so much space for their son to play. It’s going to be perfect–just like the first time Melody visited as a child. But then, a call from Evan shatters her world.

The 10th novel from the million-copy best-selling author. Three houses have been burgled in five weeks. The robbers barge in through the back, disable any way to contact the outside world, and then ransack everything - before distributing the stolen cash to local charities. It might be robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but Detective Inspector Jessica Daniel is not a happy bunny. The new DCI has a whiteboard with far too many things on the 'unsolved' side, and he wants the burglars found.