Your Child Next

Your Child Next is the latest in MJ Arlidge’s co-written books published by Orion. It asks how far you’d go to protect your child and taps into our deep-seated fears about how much we share about ourselves online and what the wrong people can do with that information.

They’ve faked your child’s death, and if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll make it a reality

Things have been difficult for Annie since her husband left and her teenage daughter, Isla, has become a ghost of her former self. Annie’s terrified that Isla might do something desperate and that she’ll lose her, too. So, when Annie receives a video of herself crying at Isla’s funeral, her blood runs cold.

Confused and horrified, Annie races upstairs to check on Isla, who is alive and well. The video is a fake. But who sent it and what do they want?

The following day Annie is approached by a stranger – a young woman who tells her that unless she sets up a direct debit for £5,000 a month to a company registered in the Cayman Islands, her daughter will die. And she mustn’t go to the police.

Annie has a deadly choice on her hands: comply with the demands or try to unmask the dangerous criminal.

Across town, rich widower Michael is struggling to hold it together for his kids. Going through his late wife’s finances, he chances upon a surprising monthly direct debit for £5,000 to a bank in the Cayman Islands, which he can’t make head or tail of. He decides to cancel it. Big mistake.

Two days later, his son Aaron is run over in a nasty hit and run but miraculously survives, making the local newspapers.

Michael holds vigil at the hospital, and it’s here that Annie (who’s made a connection between the woman who threatened her and the hit and run driver caught on doorbell footage) approaches him. Had Michael or his late wife been forced to pay money to a shell company in the Cayman Islands..?

Together the pair join forces on a desperate mission that will reveal the bewildering scale of this sickening shakedown. They will risk their lives to free themselves from an awful bind, liberating scores of other families in the process. And when their victory is assured, when the dust has finally settled, might they have found something in each other that will allow them to re-build their lives?