The Ghostwriter: An utterly compelling psychological thriller full of twists

The Ghostwriter Sarah Sheridan Copyright © 2023 Sarah Sheridan The right of Sarah Sheridan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2023 by Bloodhound Books. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. www.bloodhoundbooks.com Print ISBN: 978-1-5040-8248-8 Contents Love best-selling fiction? Also by Sarah Sheridan Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 A year later… You will also enjoy: A note from the publisher Love best-selling fiction? Love best-selling fiction? Sign up today to be the first to hear about new releases and exclusive offers, including free and discounted ebooks! Why not like us or follow us on social media to stay up to date with the latest news from your favourite authors? Facebook Twitter Instagram Also by Sarah Sheridan The Sister Veronica Mysteries: The Convent (book one) The Disciple (book two) The Tormented (book three) Devil’s Play Girl in Bed Three A Perfect Family The Temptress (novella) For my amazing friend Erin Chapter One It was my sister, Marie, who introduced me to Sylvie Kaminski. We’ve always been close, me and Marie. She looked out for me when we were little, she was bigger in size as well as age, then as now. I’m the family runt, small and skinny, with lank blonde hair rather than the glowing chestnut mop that my sister got from our mum. We’re like chalk and cheese, but we’re incredibly tight-knit, all the same. Not in a lovey, huggy kind of way, more in a ‘I’ll always have your back’ sense. I’d been complaining to Marie for a while about how my work as a ghostwriter had all but dried up since the rush before Christmas – it was now mid-March – how I had bills to pay and my six-year-old son, Danny, to feed. The company that I was signed up with – UK Ghostwriting Team – had stopped sending so many enquiries through. I wasn’t sure why, maybe they’d taken on more and more writers and had to disperse work more widely. Or perhaps someone had complained about something I’d written. Who knows? I was a single mum, I had no one else to rely on to look after Danny, so I was reluctant to look for a full-time job because it would mean I’d hardly see him. My best friend, Brigitte – who I’d been close with ever since we’d met during my first term at the University of London – had decided to move back to France last year, a change that had hit me hard. I really missed her, and we often emailed and texted, but it wasn’t the same as having her living round the corner. Now I thought of Marie as my best mate – in this country, at least. Danny and I were each other’s everything. I desperately wanted to keep working from home, as I knew his childhood years would pass quickly and I wanted to be there for them, but that was looking more and more unlikely. All I knew was that I was down to my last two hundred quid and worried out of my mind, with red letter bills coming through the door daily, when my sister rang me that early spring morning, just after I was back from the school run. ‘Polly,’ she’d said, an excited tone in her voice. ‘Guess what? I think I’ve found you a new customer. Fresh meat. And from the car she drives, I know she can afford it too.’ ‘Really?’ I said, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘Who?’ I’d learnt the hard way that it was important to make sure that potential clients had the means to pay for their books before I started writing them. The UK Ghostwriting Team got quite a few enquiries through from people who wanted us to work for free. ‘Just send me a sample,’ they’d say. Or, ‘Write the book for me and I’ll give you a share of the royalties’. Nope, that wasn’t how I did things. I asked for a down payment of two hundred pounds, to make sure that the new client could a) afford to pay me, and b) was invested in the project. And then after that, I arranged with them that they would pay me in instalments; one hundred pounds for every three thousand words written. I never wanted to get into the situation where I spent weeks putting together someone’s novel, only to find that they couldn’t pay for it after all. My confidence in myself as a writer had really grown over the last few years – especially since the bestseller – and I now realised that I wasn’t at all bad at what I did. I may not be the next Tolkien or Shakespeare, but I now understood that I could put together a pretty decent book for someone. And the book I’d written for the army vet about his time serving, that had stayed in the top UK one hundred for more than a month, was proof