Severed — Simon Kernick

A terrifying read-in-one-gulp thriller with a killer premise: what do you do when the woman in bed beside you is a headless corpse . . .

Straight off I knew it was going to be a bad day. The room was stifling hot; and when I did finally manage to drag open my eyes, all I could see was blood. I thought I'd stepped into the middle of a nightmare.

But I was wrong. The nightmare was only just beginning.

Ex-soldier Sean Tyler wakes up in an unfamiliar room next to the headless corpse of a girl he's met only once. With his memory of the previous twenty-four hours wiped clean, he's hardly out of bed before the phone rings. A voice tells him to press play on the room's DVD machine. The film shows him stabbing someone to death.

Tyler is confident that the footage is fake, but will a jury see things the same way? The man on the phone tells him to go to an address in east London, and await instructions. Tyler knows he must do as he is told. He also knows that the phone caller has no intention of keeping him alive.

To survive he must recover the missing twenty-four hours of his life and find out who's setting him up before his time runs out for good. The clock is ticking...