Christine Joanna Hart has spent her life uncovering what other people would rather keep buried.

A leading psychotherapist at The Hart Institute in Richmond, Surrey, specialising in trauma, shamanism and the hidden life of the psyche, Christine was once a private investigator working alongside the Daily Mail and The Sunday Times. She knows how to follow a lie. She knows what guilt looks like. She knows that the dead do not always leave quietly.

Then she falls in love with Ronnie Castle.

His wife is dead, but her presence remains everywhere. In the house. In Ronnie's silences. In the strange disturbances that begin to gather around Christine. Beautiful, adored and impossible to escape, the dead wife seems to inhabit the relationship like a third person at the table.

Christine is also a spiritual medium, and soon she begins to receive warnings she cannot explain. At first, she wonders whether the dead woman is jealous. Then the messages become darker.

Did Ronnie's wife really die as everyone believes?

And what connects her death to other unexplained killings in Richmond and the surrounding Surrey area?

As Christine investigates the man she loves, desire gives way to suspicion, and suspicion becomes something far more dangerous. But the dead are not always truthful, either. Is the wife trying to expose a murderer, destroy a rival, or draw Christine into a story shaped by grief, obsession and revenge?

His Dead Wife is a dark psychological thriller inspired by events from the author's own life, weaving psychotherapy, mediumship, trauma, murder and forbidden love into a haunting tale of the women who remain inside a marriage long after death.

Some women never leave the marriage.