Adrift: The gripping and haunting new crime thriller from the award-winning author of The Last Thing to Burn
By (Author) Will Dean
Hodder & Stoughton
Hodder & Stoughton
17th February 2026
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Thriller / suspense fiction
Family life fiction / Stories about family
Psychological thriller
400
Width 153mm, Height 234mm
41g
'Devastatingly good. Tense as all the best thrillers are, but with an emotional heft that will leave you deeply moved. Will Dean's storytelling just gets better and better' JENNIE GODFREY
Three of them adrift on the narrowboat.Mother, son, wickedness.Peggy Jenkins and her teenage son, Samson, live on a remote stretch of canal in the Midlands. She is a writer and he is a schoolboy. Together, they battle against the hardness and manipulation of the man they live with.Until, one day, Peggy assumes control, and their lives will never be the same again.The author of the "master class in suspense" (Shari Lapena, Sunday Times bestselling author) The Last Thing to Burn returns with a high-tension thriller about a family's descent into darkness that is perfect for fans of Denis Lehane and Lisa Jewell.I was going to say I can't remember the last time a book had me in such a chokehold, until I could. It was The Last Thing To Burn. Heartbreaking, devastating, achingly beautiful ... simply stunning -- John Marrs
Nothing is quite as it seems in this tale of a young boy caught between parents drowning at the very edges of normalcy. Suffused by a sense of menace from start to finish and devastating in its quiet rage. Powerful and poignant -- Vaseem Khan
Well-drawn characters and excellent prose -- Sarah Pearse
Devastatingly good. Tense as all the best thrillers are, but with an emotional heft that will leave you deeply moved. Will Dean's storytelling just gets better and better -- Jennie Godfrey
Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands and had lived in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying Law at the LSE and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden where he built a house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it's from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. His debut novel in the Tuva Moodyson series, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball's Book Club, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and named a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Red Snow was published in January 2019 and won Best Independent Voice at the Amazon Publishing Readers' Awards, 2019. Black River was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Award in 2021. Will also writes standalone thrillers: The Last Thing to Burn, First Born, the top twenty hardback bestseller The Last Passenger and One at a Time.