Fifteen-year-old twins Maisy and Duncan Mitcham have always had each other. Until the fateful day in the wood . . .

One night in 1960, the twins awake to find their father pulling their screaming mother from the house. She is to be committed to an asylum. It is, so their father insists, for her own good.

It's not long before they, too, are removed from their London home and sent to Nightingales - a large house deep in the New Forest countryside - to be watched over by their cold-hearted grandmother, Mrs Mitcham. Though they feel abandoned and unloved, at least here they have something they never had before - freedom.

The twins are left to their own devices, to explore, find new friends and first romances. That is until the day that Duncan doesn't come back for dinner. Nor does he return the next day. Or the one after that.

When the bodies of other young boys are discovered in the surrounding area the police appear to give up hope of finding Duncan alive. With Mrs Mitcham showing little interest in her grandson's disappearance, it is up to Maisy to discover the truth. And she knows just where to start. The woman who lives alone in the wood about whom so many rumours abound. A woman named Grace Deville.

The Woman in the Wood is a powerful, passionate and sinister tale of a young woman's courage, friendship and determination.

Santa Montefiore and Penny Vincenzi fans will swiftly fall for Lesley Pearse's mesmerising novels - you'll want to read them again and again . . .

'Heart-warming and evocative, a real delight to read' Sun

'A narrative that gallops along, this is quintessential Pearse that will delight her army of readers' Daily Mail

'Glorious, heartwarming' Woman & Home

'Evocative, compelling, told from the heart' Sunday Express