Severed

by Simon Kernick

(2007)

Publisher: Corgi

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 recently. With his memory of the previous 24 hours wiped clean, he’s hardly out of bed before the he notices a note next to the TV telling 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 at the end of the phone tells him that if he wants the evidence to disappear, he must go to an address in east London, and await further 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 24 hours of his life and find out who’s setting him up before his time runs out for good. The clock is ticking…