Today I’m thrilled to be taking part in The Boyfriend by Kerry Wilkinson’s Book tour. I am hosting an extract for the book which is another prime example of Kerry Wilkinson’s skilful writing. Thanks to Bookouture for inviting me along.
He went missing when you were sixteen. Was it all your fault?
Trembling with shock, Jodie picks up the old T-shirt. She hasn’t seen it for twenty years. Her boyfriend had been wearing it – her Ben – the day he went missing. The last time anyone saw him alive.
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. She can’t shake his questions about her older brother, and the real reason their dad left everything to Jodie, not him. But when a stranger begins to follow her around their little town, and a deadly fire breaks out in her home, it’s clear someone will do anything to stop Jodie finding the truth about Ben’s disappearance. Has Jodie unknowingly put her own son in terrible danger?
An absolutely addictive psychological thriller with a heart-stopping twist, about how even the people we love can hide the darkest secrets. Perfect for fans of The Girl on the Train, I Am Watching You and Shari Lapena.
Doesn’t the synopsis sound great? Here is the extract. I hope you like it as much as I did!
It was a few hours after her dad’s funeral that Jodie stood on the pavement outside the house in which she’d grown up. She blinked into the spring sunshine that dappled through the thumbprint clouds and took in the bricks that were far more than simply bricks.
The upstairs bathroom window of the house was open a crack, as it always was. Her dad had been obsessed with potential damp and left tatty old dishcloths on every radiator, ready to clear windows of mist. The bathroom was the worst offender and that window remained open year-round. Jodie shivered atthe memory of brushing her teeth while they chattered in the middle of December.
Dads could be weird. Hers in particular. At the side of the house was the wheelie bin with the large ‘43’ painted on the front, the same as it had been for years. The ‘no free newspaper’ sign was still taped to the inside of the frontdoor, the words printed in her father’s neat handwriting. As it had been for a decade.
All the same and yet… different.
There was a shuffling at Jodie’s side and then, ‘You don’t have to clear anything today,’ Fiona said. ‘Come back tomorrow, or the day after. It’s not going anywhere.’
Jodie knew her friend was right, except the funeral itself had felt like a rallying call to get on with things. Since her father’s death, there’d been endless amounts of paperwork. There were people to tell, phone calls to make, letters to send, forms to fill, text messages that needed a reply – and that was the day after he died. Then there was planning the funeral itself, the reading of the will, more forms, more phone calls, more letters, more texts.
Sorting out the admin around her father’s death had turned into a part-time job.
The clearing of her dad’s house was something Jodie had deliberately pushed back. It was as she’d stood in the church, listening to the vicar say her dad wouldn’t hurt a fly, that she’d decided it was one job that needed to be done as soon as possible.
‘I’d rather it was out of the way,’ Jodie replied. Her throat was dry, and the words crackled their way out.
Fiona had been smoking a cigarette and she crouched before mashing it into the drain. She avoided Jodie’s disapproving look.
‘I can help if you want,’ Fiona offered.
Jodie remained standing on the pavement, staring towards her childhood home. Words and thoughts were easier than action. ‘I think I need to do it myself,’ she said.
Author Bio
Kerry Wilkinson is from the English county of Somerset but has spent far too long living in the north. It’s there that he’s picked up possibly made-up regional words like ‘barm’ and ‘ginnel’. He pretends to know what they mean.
He’s also been busy since turning thirty: his Jessica Daniel crime series has sold more than a million copies in the UK; he has written a fantasy-adventure trilogy for young adults; a second crime series featuring private investigator Andrew Hunter and the standalone thriller, Down Among The Dead Men.
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