"I use something I call 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 I want to punch them in the face with a shovel." Helen Walsh doesn't believe in fear—it's just something 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 dubious ex-boyfriend, Jay Parker, who appears with a missing persons case—the target: Wayne Diffney, the 'Wacky One' of the boy band Laddz. Playing by her own rules, Helen is drawn into a dark and glamorous world where her greatest enemy is her own mind and where she feels a growing connection to Wayne, a man she's never met. Gripping throughout, moving and remarkably funny, The Mystery of Mercy Close is a novel unlike any you've ever read, and Helen Walsh—courageous, vulnerable and astute—is the perfect heroine for our times.