The Wrong Girl

A dark and gripping mystery of celebrity obsession and the lies families tell each other. In 2006, three-year-old Phoebe Piper went missing on a family holiday. Despite massive publicity and a long investigation, no trace of her was ever found. Seven years later, Molly Jackson, aged ten and recently uprooted to a Norfolk village, finds her great uncle Dan dead in his bed. Molly remembers nothing of her early years, but she's been sure for ages that she is Phoebe. Everything in her life points to it and now, finally, she has proof. Dan's death brings his hippie sister Janice back to Norfolk where she's re-united with Molly's mother Suze, the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier. Janice discovers that a former lover, Joe Vincent, lives nearby. Joe was a rock star who, at the height of his fame, turned his back on public life. As she is drawn back into the past, Janice begins to wonder if Dan's death and Joe's reputation as a reclusive acid casualty are quite what they appear. And then Molly disappears.

Laura Wilson was brought up in London and has degrees in English Literature from Somerville College, Oxford and UCL, London. She has worked briefly and ingloriously as a teacher, and more successfully as an editor of non-fiction books. She has written history books for children and is interested in history, particularly of the recent past, painting and sculpture, uninhabited buildings, underground structures, cemeteries and time capsules.

Her first novel A LITTLE DEATH was shortlisted for both the CWA Ellis Peters and the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original. A THOUSAND LIES was shortlisted for the 2006 Duncan Lawrie Dagger. THE LOVER won the 2004 Prix du Polar Europeen for Best Crime Novel of the Year In Translation and was also shortlisted for the 2004 Gold Dagger and the Ellis Peters Award. In 2008, she won the Ellis Peters Award with her novel STRATTON'S WAR. She lives in Islington.

About Laura Wilson