VBT# The Family Lies - Lorna Henderson - July 2026 There's a particular kind of ache that comes with childhood memories you can never quite trust again, and Lorna Henderson taps straight into it with The Family Lies. I went in expecting a straightforward family drama and came out with my heart in my throat and my loyalties in the wrong place entirely but more on that later. The story opens with a memory that colours everything after it: fourteen-year-old Suzie and her cousin Rachel on holiday in Canada with Aunt Linda, in what turns out to be their final day together. A car accident takes Linda and Rachel, and Suzie carries that loss for thirty years, never imagining she'll ever learn what really happened. Then her mother dies, and the past comes crashing back in. A box in the attic. A patient named Nicole who seems to know far more than she should. And cousin Jake, conveniently poised to inherit his father's estate now that Suzie's mother is gone. Lorna Henderson l...

Review: The Sketch Artist - Amanda McKinney - September 2026 I'll admit it: this one caught me before I'd even read the blurb. That cover pulled me in first, all moody and atmospheric, the kind of image that makes you stop scrolling. But what sealed the deal was the setting - a small town creeping up on the 40th anniversary of the Fall Camp Murders, with a horrifying wrinkle: they executed the wrong man. That premise alone had my mind spinning with possibilities before I'd turned a single page. Our heroine, Harper Leighton, has one of the most fascinating jobs I've come across in a thriller. She's a courtroom sketch artist, she spends her days studying the faces of dangerous people, reading their guilt in the smallest flickers of expression. It's such a clever occupation to build a mystery around, because it means Harper is trained to see what others miss. So when she becomes the one being watched, the irony lands hard. The story kicks into gear when Harper...

Review: All The Lies They Told - Robin Mahle - August 2025 There's a particular kind of dread that comes from watching two families you already suspect are hiding something. Robin Mahle taps straight into it in All The Lies They Told, and I devoured every page. I'll admit I came into this one with high expectations. I've toured several of Robin Mahle's thrillers now through Zooloos Book Tours , and she's never once let me down  but this book, loosely inspired by the real-life Delphi case, felt like it demanded even more from her, and she delivered. The setup is deceptively simple: Lexi Brewer and Skye Metcalf were once inseparable, the kind of friends who walked home from school together sharing secrets like currency. Now they barely speak. Their families barely speak. And then, on one ordinary evening, both girls simply don't come home. What follows isn't just a missing-persons investigation, it's an excavation. Robin Mahle peels back layer after lay...

Review: Dig Two Graves - Gigi Johnston - September 2024 I'll be honest with you, dear readers, I finished this book at 1am, wide awake, silently cheering for a killer. That's not something I say often, but Dig Two Graves earns it. Gigi Johnston opens with a premise that guts you before the story even gets going: two children, a boy and a girl, trapped in a children's home that was supposed to protect them and instead became the place that broke them. The boy escapes. Years pass. He comes back  not as a victim, but as a reckoning. One by one, the adults who hurt him start turning up dead, and I found myself flipping pages hoping he'd get to the next name on his list before anyone stopped him. Gigi Johnston has a rare gift for writing vigilante justice that never feels gratuitous, every death lands with weight, but never sympathy for the ones who deserved it. Meanwhile, on the other side of the case, Officers Brady and Jones are doing what good detectives do: followi...

Review: When the Moon Hatched - Book #1 Moonfall Series - Sarah A. Parker - November 2024 I'll be honest upfront: romantasy isn't usually my genre. But this one had been sitting on my shelf staring at me for long enough that I finally caved, and I'm glad I did. From the first few chapters, When the Moon Hatched pulled me in with how effortlessly it reads. There's nothing clunky or overwrought about the prose here , it just flows, chapter after chapter, in a way that makes it dangerously easy to tell yourself "just one more" long after you meant to put it down. If you've read Throne of Glass, you'll probably feel the same familiar hum I did. The setup centers on two women who turn out to be long-lost royalty, both reshaped into assassins after an accident that left them with amnesia, both quietly fighting to protect the very people who don't know who they really are. It's a premise that leans into tropes I've seen before, but Sarah A. ...

  Review: The Weekend Guests - Liza North - January 2025 There's a particular kind of dread that comes from watching old friends reunite while knowing, as the reader, that not everyone is who they claim to be anymore. Liza North taps straight into that feeling in The Weekend Guests, and honestly, I was hooked from the very first postcard. Five old university friends - Aline, Sienna, Rob, Michael, and Brandon  haven't all been in a room together for years. Now they're gathering at Aline's stunning clifftop house in Dorset, the kind of setting that practically begs to be photographed for an estate agent's brochure, right up until you remember someone in this group might be capable of murder. There's wine, there's the slightly awkward business of meeting each other's partners for the first time, there's a sitter minding the kids so the grown-ups can relax. It should be idyllic. It is not idyllic. Because underneath the reunion warmth sits somethi...

Review: Dark Poison - Book #1 Dark Brothers Series - Bec Botefuhr/Bella Jewel - March 2013 Scrolling through my Kindle the other night, I was in the mood for something older, something that felt like coming home. That's when I clicked on Dark Poison by Bec Botefuhr. The cover I remember is different from the one floating around now , mine was the self-published OG version, sitting on my Kindle since 2013, patiently waiting for me to fall back into it. And fall back into it I did. Reading this book was like stepping into a time machine set to 2013, back when indie authors were just beginning to find their footing and the market hadn't yet been flooded with the endless sameness we see today. This was a world where writers released books because they had a story to tell, not because they were pumping them out on a conveyor belt like James Patterson. It was also a world before Fifty Shades of Grey changed everything, before dark romance and erotica fiction became the juggernaut gen...

Review: Lost in the Fire - Robin Mahle - July 2026 This is the third of Robin Mahle's books I've picked up through the Zooloos Book Tours, and after enjoying the first two so much, there was no way I was passing this one by when I saw it on offer. There's something lovely about finding an author whose books you can trust to deliver, and Mahle has become one of those for me. Lost in the Fire doesn't ease you in gently. It opens with real force, the main character's house going up in flames, and within the first few pages we lose both her husband and her son to the fire. I'll admit this part gave me pause, as a mother myself I kept thinking, surely your first instinct is to go for your child? It sat a little uneasily with me, but it didn't stop me turning the pages. Avery wakes up in hospital afterwards with amnesia, and this is where the story really gets its hooks into you. She can't remember being married. She can't remember having a son. And now ...

Review: Just One Catch - Nikki Vogel - July 2026 T he premise alone had me hooked before I'd even opened the first page. Harper and Lauren have just lost their parents in a sudden accident, and grief hasn't even had time to settle before the will reading turns their world upside down again. Lauren has been disinherited entirely. Everything, the $3 million, the freehold house, all of it, goes to Harper. But there's a catch (just one, as the title promises): she only gets it if she divorces her husband, Kyle. That's such a deliciously uncomfortable question to sit with, isn't it? Would you give up your marriage for a fortune, if your own parents seemed to be all but begging you to from beyond the grave? And worse, would you start to wonder what they knew that you didn't? As the story unfolds, Vogel does a lovely job of letting suspicion creep in slowly, like a kettle coming to boil on the stove. Kyle starts to seem like exactly the kind of man your parents wou...

    Review: The Daughter in the Cellar - Yvette Davies - July 2026 There's something about a UK psychological thriller that just hits differently, isn't there? Less blood-splatter, more slow-creeping dread , the kind that settles into your bones over a cup of tea rather than jumping out at you. That's exactly what I found in The Daughter in the Cellar , and it's why I ended up loving it so much. At its heart, this is Violet's story, a woman who wanted nothing more than to be a mother, but was born without a uterus and never got the chance. Instead of accepting a life without that dream, she's spent years finding "daughters" of her own, brunette girls she takes and keeps, hoping this time it will stick. Three didn't last. Now there's Florence,  a young woman who thought she'd simply met a kind stranger willing to help her one ordinary night, only to wake up locked in a cellar, realising far too late what kind of help she'd actually acce...