The Winter's Child

Book excerpt: A woman’s desperation over her long-missing son leads her into dark places: “A stunning, beautifully disturbing mystery.”—Foreword Reviews Five years ago, Susannah Harper’s teenage son Joel went missing without a trace. Bereft of her son, and then abandoned by her husband, Susannah tries to accept that she may never know for certain what has happened to her lost loved ones. But then, on the last night of Hull Fair, a Roma fortune-teller makes an eerie prediction—on Christmas Eve, Joel will finally come back to her. Soon, Susannah is drawn into a world of psychics and charlatans, half-truths and hauntings, friendships and betrayals—forcing her to confront the buried truths of her family’s past… “Parkin is best at dramatizing the tension between the rational and irrational sides of her heroine’s mind.”—Publishers Weekly “Utterly addictive.”—Louise Beech, award-winning author of I Am Dust