Showing results by author "Kerry Wilkinson" in All Categories

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.

Paige, Richard and me. We thought we’d be friends forever. But everything changed the day we took the shortcut home from school along the old railway line. I wish we’d gone the long way. I wish we hadn’t seen our classmate, pale and still in the undergrowth. And I wish we hadn’t promised to keep one, awful detail a secret just between us....

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.

Rose Denton wakes up in her car. She has no memory of how she got there. But she knows something bad happened.... There’s blood on the windscreen and bonnet - but it’s not hers, and there’s no sign of anything or anyone she might have hit. The last thing she remembers is being in a hotel on a business trip, but now she’s miles away. Back home, her daughter’s boyfriend is missing. The last thing he did was argue with Rose over money. He left no note, no text, no clue as to his whereabouts. The police have questions - and so does Rose.

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.

Emma is so happy to have moved from the city to her husband’s small hometown. James was strangely reluctant at first – but she convinced him their little cottage is the perfect place to settle down. The perfect place to give their six-year-old son a new life. But then a woman at the school gates asks Emma if she is really married to ‘that man’. ‘Which man?’ Emma asks. The woman replies…

A man who survived being drowned ends up in Manchester’s canal. Someone who was hit by a car is shoved in front of DC Archie Davey’s patrol vehicle. Killers generally aren’t a happy bunch, but this particular one seems to have a problem with second chances. Luckily for DI Jessica Daniel, things are looking up. She’s been assigned to work on the most crime-free estate in the city, and she’s back living with her best friend. Things could not be hunky-dorier. That is unless there’s a sinister reason why the estate is so free of trouble....

I stare at the newspaper article about a baby snatched from the back of a car 30 years ago and wonder why someone would post it through my door. Looking closer, my blood freezes. The little girl in the photo has an unusual scar - just like mine. I’ve never met anyone with one like it. Is this stolen child...me? Trembling with shock, I know I have to confront my mother. My parents got me through a horrific accident, helped me find a job I love teaching art, and even with buying my own house. But was it all built on lies?

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.

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....

Everyone’s invited. Someone will never leave. In a grand townhouse rented specially for the evening, Hannah beams at her guests under the sparkling chandelier. Her sisters, her mother and aunt, her best friends...although she’ll miss them all so much when she moves away, tonight is about celebrating the happy times and raising a toast to the future. But the next morning, one of the guests is found cold and lifeless in their pristine white bed. Hannah is desperate to call the police. After all, it must have been an accident.

Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel has barely left her house in months, isolated from friends and colleagues. She may have given up on herself, but one man is sure she still has something to offer. DCI Jack Cole gives her a chance at redemption: an opportunity to help a neighbouring force by discovering what is going on with a reclusive community living in a stately home in the middle of nowhere. People are going missing, turning up dead with only vague links back to the house.

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?

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.

It’s almost midnight when Jennifer sees her son’s name flash up on her phone. Away at university, she’s normally so happy when he calls. But something is terribly wrong… Jennifer is devastated for poor Ella’s family–losing their precious girl, so young. She knows her sweet son, just twenty years old, would never, ever harm anyone. But the police are looking for him. And if Dan is innocent, why has he run?

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.

Seventeen years ago, Damian Walker abducted five women because the voices in his head told him to. Now he has been declared sane and is about to be released back onto Manchester's streets with a new identity. But within hours, there is another attack similar to his previous ones. Walker has proof it's not him - but is he reliable, and, if so, who is trying to frame him?

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?

I pinch the screen to zoom until I’m staring at the face of a ghost. A man with very short hair, staring directly at the camera with piercing brown eyes. He is as he was when I last saw him: wrinkles around the corners of the eyes and a knowing smirk. That’s the expression I see when I can’t sleep. My body tenses. It can’t be him. It’s not my ex-husband. It’s not David. I know that better than anyone because he didn’t walk out on me. He didn’t disappear two years ago and he’s not a missing person. I know that for a fact because I’m the one who killed him.