J.A. Baker

Jackson and Lydia Hemsworth are pillars of the community, feted for having the perfect marriage and three wonderful children – Florence, Jessica and Ezra. But appearances can be deceptive. Because behind closed doors Jackson Hemsworth rules his family with cruelty and control. His marriage is a sham; his children for years have cowed in fear. Until the day that Jackson and Lydia throw themselves off Newport Bridge in a joint suicide pact – the final cruel blow by Jackson to control his wife and torture his adult children. As the Hemsworth siblings return to their family home, they must try to make sense of their parents’ last act. But there are many dark secrets waiting to be unearthed at Armett House. Like, why are the townsfolk so suddenly hostile towards them? And who are the strangers who arrive at Armett House unannounced? And why has their mother’s body still not been found? In the aftermath of their parents’ death, it becomes clear that something terrible is about to be exposed about the Hemsworths’ perfect parents. A secret they may all wish had stayed hidden…

When local woman Deborah goes missing, her colleagues Adrian, Yvonne and Merriel are all left in shock. Gossip around the office begins to swirl – what could have happened to Deborah? Is she dead or alive? And who could be responsible for her disappearance? Everyone is terrified that they could be next…except the one person who has all the answers. The last person people expect. Because Deborah is being held captive by a monster, a psychopath. But not a stranger… it’s someone she knows all too well…

A long-ago trauma and a family mystery may shed light on her troubled sleep—or pull her into the darkness once and for all . . . As a child, Grace Cooper suffered from bouts of sleepwalking. Now, after the unexpected death of her husband, she’s moved back to Woodburn Cottage, her childhood home—and the sleepwalking returns. It’s all stirring up dark memories—memories that involve the disappearance of her brother Simon, who vanished one night when he was a child, and the death of her father, who fell from an upstairs window. With her mother in a care home with dementia and her sister living in a nearby village, Grace tries to settle in—but with the passage of time, the sleepwalking only becomes more regular and the blurred memories of the past only become more disturbing. Spurred on by these hazy dreamlike recollections, Grace becomes determined to find out what happened to Simon that fateful night. But digging up the past isn’t always a good idea, because you never know what skeletons you might unearth . . .

From autumn to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk.It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.

Welcome to Winters End... Winters End should have been the perfect place for me and my husband Neil to start again. To leave the terrible secrets and guilt of our past far behind us. But from the moment we arrived in the small, isolated community, it becomes clear to me that we are not welcome here. That someone wants us to leave… I’m certain that everyone knows our secrets – knows who we really are. But how can that be? Perhaps it’s my mind playing tricks on me. Just like before. I know Neil thinks I'm paranoid. My thoughts spiralling. Again. If only I had someone else to talk to. Another woman to confide in. And that’s when I realise something far more terrifying. I am the only wife at Winters End…and I could be the last…