Showing results by author "Lesley Pearse" in All Categories

She witnessed a murder - and now her life is in danger. Fifteen year-old Belle, though raised in a London brothel, is an innocent. But when she witnesses one of the girls brutally strangled by a client, she is cast into a cruel, heartless world. Snatched from the streets and sold into prostitution, she is made a courtesan in New Orleans.

Eve should never have married Don Hathaway. Yes, he gave her two beautiful children - Olly and Tabitha - but he is a bully. Worse than that, he hurts her. But, after one drunken rage too many, she has the courage to leave him. Eve is warned that it's a difficult path, yet she needs to give her children hope for the future. Don, however, is bitter. And getting away entirely from him proves impossible. Until the day, Eve tries to teach him a lesson - and it all goes horribly wrong.

Lesley Pearse didn't publish her first novel until she was 48. Now she has sold over ten million books around the world and is a constant presence on the bestseller chart. A writer of heart-stopping stories, Lesley's books are filled with heroines struggling to make it in a difficult world. Yet this description could apply to Lesley herself. In this, her first ever autobiography, she tells of growing up in an orphanage after her mother's death, her racy twenties in London during the swinging sixties and working as a bunny girl and dressmaker.

Susan walks into a busy doctor's surgery and guns down two members of staff. Then she calmly waits for the police. Beth is the lawyer assigned to defend Susan. But her client is uncooperative until both women realise that 29 years earlier, they were childhood friends. As the evidence against Susan mounts up, both she and Beth begin to talk about the secrets and the traumas that sent them down such different paths in life. Their friendship grows stronger. But for one of them, there can be no happy ending....

When Ruby and Verity met as girls, they came from different worlds. Verity was privately educated, living in a beautiful Hampstead home, while Ruby was being raised in extreme poverty. Nevertheless, they became firm friends. However, fortunes are not set in stone, and soon the girls find their situations reversed. As Ruby goes up in the world, Verity encounters more and more tragedy, but still the girls remain a large part of each other's lives.

Scotland, 1995. On the hills of Cornton Vale Prison. She was convicted of killing her best friend.... Laura Brannigan has been put away for murder. She insists that she didn't kill Jackie. But her search for true justice seems futile. Then she receives a letter that takes her back to her youth and the memory of an old love, Stuart....

When her husband returns shell-shocked and broken from the Great War and his mother makes her life a misery, Betty Wellow discovers how bitter and hard life can truly be. But it is not until a devastating storm sweeps through their small fishing village and endangers her life that she sees her chance to escape - and takes it. Fleeing to Bristol, she changes her name to Mabel Brook and takes a position as a maid. But tragedy strikes once more after the sudden death of her mistress, and she is cast back onto the streets.

Twenty-three-year-old Katy Speed is fascinated by the house across the street. The woman who lives there, Gloria, is the most glamorous neighbour on the avenue, owning a fashionable dress shop in Bexhill-on-Sea. But who is the woman who arrives in the black car most Saturdays while Gloria is at work? Sometimes she brings women to the house, other times they have children. Hilda, Katy's mother, disapproves of Gloria. She wonders if these mysterious visitors have just been released from prison. Is Gloria secretly bringing criminals, or worse, into the heart of the community?

On the day Nina and Conrad Best move into their new home in picture-perfect Willow Close a body is discovered. Hurrying inside with their belongings, they see horrified neighbours gather by the police cordon - one of the residents has been attacked and brutally killed in the woods. Believing someone must have seen the murderer, the police interview all the residents of the Close. They soon find out that each neighbour harbours their own secrets.

In a Shepherd's Bush bedsit, Amelia White dreams of being a reporter. The closest she's come is selling advertising in the local paper. Until the fateful day she stumbles on a truly shocking scoop. Round the corner from her home, she discovers the body of a murder victim, dumped among the rubbish. When the police and reporters descend, Amelia is horrified at the assumptions made and lies soon to be spread about this poor young woman.