The haunting of Maddy Clare

Sarah Piper lives alone in 1920s England on very little money and with almost no experience of the world. When her temporary agency sends her to work for Alistair Gellis, a wealthy ghost hunter, her narrow routine is interrupted.

Gellis is handsome, obsessed with the dead and marked by his service in the First World War. He has been called to look into the spirit of Maddy Clare, a nineteen-year-old serving maid said to haunt the barn where she took her own life. Maddy hated men while she lived and refuses to speak to them now, so Sarah is needed to approach her.

Sarah does not want to enter that barn alone. Then Matthew Ryder arrives, Gellis's associate, a rough and unsettling man who also fought in the trenches and carries scars that Sarah cannot easily read.

The haunting is no hoax. Maddy is angry, and her powers defy explanation. Sarah and Matthew have to learn who the maid was, where she came from and what drives her thirst for vengeance before she turns on everyone near her.

This is a historical ghost story with a female narrator, an uneasy partnership at its centre and a menace that grows as the investigation goes on.