The Mystery of Mercy Close - Marian Keyes

"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.

Marian Keyes is the international bestselling author of Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, Rachel's Holiday, Last Chance Saloon, Sushi for Beginners, Angels, The Other Side of the Story, Anybody Out There, This Charming Man, The Brightest Star in the Sky, The Mystery of Mercy Close, The Woman Who Stole My Life, The Break and Grown Ups. Her journalism, collected under two titles, Making It Up As I Go Along and Under the Duvet: Deluxe Edition, containing the original publications Under the Duvet and Further Under the Duvet, are also available from Penguin. Marian lives in Dublin with her husband.

The Mystery of Mercy Close is the tale of strong and sassy but vulnerable, private detective Helen Walsh who is looking for a missing person - but can she find him before she loses herself?

'I have a habit of taking instant dislikes to people. Simply because it saves time . . .'