Wild Thing by Joolz Denby

Annie Wynter is back in Bradford after decades away. Determined that the traumas of her past – the loss of an unborn child, the abrupt departure of the love of her life – will remain hidden in her hometown, she reinvents herself as a social worker. Not such a far cry from her former profession as a London record company executive in some ways, she still ministers to self-destructive drug- and alcohol-fuelled teens. Then a series of events shatter her hard-fought existence. A TV report relays the death of her lost lover, Johnny X. A client, teenage mother Sam Jagger, loses her three-year-old son Jake while out drinking and the tabloids descend, lured by the prophecies of Sam's soothsaying mother. What has happened to Jake is worse than anyone can imagine, as Annie discovers when she is called out to a remote smallholding on the moors, where she comes face to face with something straight from folklore… Denby's hair-raising novel manifests our most primordial fears in an authentic contemporary setting.