Lost Souls

the long version

Sometimes the worst nightmares happen in broad daylight... An utterly gripping novel for fans of Peter James and Mark Billingham, from a rising star in the crime genre. A woman is found brutally murdered on a quiet housing estate, her tongue and eyes ritualistically gouged out. Children are being abducted and then returned to their families days later without a scratch and with no knowledge or where they have been - or with whom. If DC Laura McGanity thought moving from London to sleepy Lancashire was taking the easy option then she can think again. Already worried about uprooting young son Bobby to follow her reporter boyfriend Jack Garrett back to his hometown, she must quickly get a handle on these mystifying cases terrifying the people of Blackley - without putting the local officers' noses out of joint. Meanwhile, restless Jack is itching to get back to his writing and the cases provide the perfect opportunity to do so. But as he delves deeper into them, he finds murky connections between the two crimes and skeletons buried in the most unlikely of closets. Most astonishing of all, he meets a man who 'paints' the future - terrible events come to him in vivid dreams which he then puts onto canvas. This 'precognition' is not so much a gift as a curse and to Jack it becomes terrifyingly that many people, including his own family, are in danger...