Review: Five Voices - Tamara Moss - September 2026 I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for a good “who did it?” and the moment I read the blurb for Five Voices, I knew I’d be settling in for a binge. If you’ve ever lost a weekend to Karen McManus or Sara Shepard (guilty on both counts, they’re two of my all-time favourites), then pop the kettle on, because this one belongs on your shelf. Picture this: five friends, one hugely popular podcast, and a board game table where the debates get a little too heated. Rosie, William, Simone, Zac and Ocean make up the Five Voices, and then one night, an hour after a blazing argument during recording, William is found dead. Just like that, there are four suspects and every one of them is swearing they’re innocent. What really hooked me was Rosie. She’s determined to find out who killed William, her best friend, or so she believed. Rosie wears the rosiest of rose-coloured glasses when it comes to him, and I found myself wanting to gently tap her on the sh...

VBT# Good Twin, Bad Twin - Renita D'Silva - October 2026 I’ll admit it straight away: I have a soft spot for stories about twins. There’s something endlessly fascinating about two people who start out so alike and end up so different, and Good Twin, Bad Twin gave me plenty to chew on. It opens with a chilling hook. A postcard arrives bearing a pretty Cotswold village and a nickname only one person ever used, a person who, by rights, shouldn’t be able to send it. If she’s alive, then whose body is buried under the patio? I was hooked by the end of the first chapter. Our narrator was the shy, bookish twin, forever living in the shadow of her golden sister. Now she has what she always wanted: a stunning home on the Dorset cliffs, a handsome husband and a beautiful teenage daughter. But her husband vanishes at night, and the family dog seems to be the only one who truly loves her. Cosy it is not, and I loved every unsettling minute. This is very much an unreliable narrator story, and...

Review: The Man in the Photo - McGarvey Black - September 2026 There's a particular kind of book that gets under my skin before I've even turned the first page, and it's this one: stories about people living double lives, walking away from everything they knew, and building someone new out of the wreckage. I don't know what it is about reinvention that fascinates me so much ,  maybe it's the fantasy of a clean slate, maybe it's the horror of realizing you never really knew someone at all  but The Man in the Photo delivers that obsession in spades. The setup alone had me settled into my reading chair with a cup of tea, utterly hooked. Our narrator is doing something so ordinary, so achingly relatable  scrolling through her daughter's holiday photos from Australia  when the ground shifts beneath her. There, in the background of a stranger's snapshot: a blue shirt, a gray beard, a face she buried over twenty years ago. Her fiancé. The father of her child....

Review: The River Runs Black - Book #2 North Country Novel - Tessa Wegert - October 2026 The River Runs Black drops us into the deceptively peaceful town of Alexandria Bay, nestled in New York's Thousand Islands region,  the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone, and nothing bad is supposed to happen. But when a teenager dies of a drug overdose around the same time as a record-breaking cocaine bust along the Canadian border, Investigator Tim Wellington and his team think they've caught a lucky break. Case closed, right? Wrong. The lab results throw everything sideways ,  the cocaine that killed that teenager doesn't match the cocaine from the bust. Which means there's a second, far more dangerous supply still moving through town, run by people willing to protect it at any cost. Suddenly Investigator Tim Wellington isn't just solving a crime  he's racing against a ticking clock, knowing the next casualty could be another local kid caught in the crossf...

Review: Thornbird - E. Kennedy - June 2026 I had high hopes for Thornbird by E. Kennedy because, honestly, the premise sounded like it had been written specifically for me. A serial killer father? A mother who was one of his victims? A daughter who changes her name and creates a whole new identity to escape the shadow of his crimes? Come on  that is basically catnip for a thriller reader! Ten years after infamous serial killer Gabriel Thorn was caught, Ryan Shipley returns to Starling, Tennessee, determined to keep her head down and her true identity hidden. Nobody can know who she really is or the connection she has to the notorious killer. But when fresh eyes begin digging into the old case, the secrets Ryan has worked so hard to bury start clawing their way back to the surface. Cryptic texts, unsettling coincidences and a chilling note all suggest that someone knows more than they should. And as questions surrounding Gabriel Thorn's crimes begin resurfacing, Ryan finds herself r...

Review: My Twin Sister - Alesha Dykema - August 2026 There are some thriller tropes that I just can’t resist, and long-lost family members, missing people and someone coming back from the dead are definitely high on my list. So when I picked up My Twin Sister by Alesha Dykema, I was immediately intrigued. Because how would you react if the twin sister you believed had died eighteen years ago suddenly walked into your father’s funeral? That is exactly what happens to Gen. Grace was supposed to have drowned when the sisters were just nineteen. Gen has spent nearly two decades believing that her twin is gone, so seeing Grace standing there, alive and well, is understandably a huge shock. But the surprises don’t stop there. Grace reveals that she suffered from amnesia and has only just remembered who she really is. Except Gen doesn’t believe her. And there’s a very good reason for that. Grace was once in love with Gen’s husband, Wyatt. Suddenly, Gen is living the life that Grace once dream...

VBT# Lie in the Bay - Book #2 A Little White Lies Thriller - Holly Danvers - June 2026 There's a particular kind of comfort in a small town, the kind where everyone waves from their porch, the diner knows your order, and duck hunting season means casseroles and gossip in equal measure. I curled up with Lie in the Bay expecting exactly that kind of cozy, familiar backdrop. What I got instead was a slow, delicious unraveling of just how little "cozy" and "familiar" actually mean once you start looking closely at the people behind the porch lights. That's the real magic of this book. Holly Danvers doesn't hand you a town full of obvious villains, she hands you neighbours. The kind you'd bring a pie to. The kind you'd trust to watch your dog. And then, one thread at a time, she shows you how much of that trust was never really earned, just assumed. I found myself thinking about my own street more than once while reading this. Do I actually know t...

Review: Home Truths - Charity Norman - August 2024 I picked this one up on my Kindle while scrolling the other day and landed on Home Truths by Charity Norman. I'd heard her name before she's based here in New Zealand now but I honestly had no idea what I was walking into. The first chapter drops you straight into a courtroom, with Livia (who I quickly clocked as the mum of the family) on trial for torturing a man, waiting on the jury's decision. Then the book pulls back to the beginning, to show exactly how this ordinary family fell apart, domino by domino. It starts with her husband's brother dying, and from there Scott spirals into health-conspiracy territory , the rabbit-hole kind, the kind that turns extremist, especially once he starts watching videos and corresponding with a man called Dr. Jack. Meanwhile their daughter Heidi starts shoplifting, using the guilt and pain of it as a strange outlet for everything she's been bottling up. This is a proper slow-b...

Review: Slice - Angie Caedis - September 2023 There's something so satisfying about judging a book by its cover and having it actually pay off, and that's exactly what happened with Slice. I had absolutely no idea what this story was about when I picked it up , I just knew I loved the cover and had to click in. Sometimes that's all it takes, isn't it? What I got was one of my all-time favourite tropes: a group of people stranded on a secluded island, being picked off one by one. There's just something so deliciously tense about that setup, and Caedis leans right into it. The story follows Bec, celebrating her thirtieth birthday (which, funnily enough, feels extra fitting to be reading about on my own birthday today) with a trip her boyfriend Tyler has organised a private mansion, a secluded island, and their whole friend group along for the week. It starts off exactly how these trips always do in books like this: sun, drinks, laughter... and then the cracks start ...