The Mystery of Mercy Close: British Book Awards Author of the Year 2022

A heartbreaking stunner of a novel from the UK’s biggest-selling writer of women’s fiction

I employ this thing called The Shovel List.

A shovel…?

No. A Shovel List. It’s more of a conceptual thing. It’s a list of all the people and things I hate so much that I want to hit them in the face with a shovel.

Helen Walsh doesn’t believe in fear - it’s just a thing invented by men to get all the money and good jobs - and yet she’s sinking. Her work as a Private Investigator has dried up, her flat has been repossessed and now some old demons have resurfaced.

Not least in the form of her charming but dodgy ex-boyfriend Jay Parker, who shows up with a missing persons case - the target- Wayne Diffney, the ‘Wacky One’ from boyband Laddz..

Playing by her own rules, Helen is drawn into a dark and glamorous world, where her worst enemy is her own head and where increasingly the only person she feels connected to is Wayne, a man she’s never even met.

Utterly compelling, moving and very very funny, The Mystery of Mercy Close is unlike any novel you’ve ever read and Helen Walsh - courageous, vulnerable and wasp-tongued - is the perfect heroine for our times.