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...

VBT# The Home Swap - A.A Chaudhuri - September 2026 There's something delightfully unsettling about curling up on your own sofa, tea in hand, reading a thriller about a house swap gone catastrophically wrong. I'll admit, I've had the same daydream as everyone else,  swapping keys with a lovely couple in Cornwall or the Cotswolds, waking up somewhere new, pretending for a week that our lives are a little more glamorous than they are. And then, being the thriller addict I am, that fantasy always curdles into the same nagging thought: but what if they're weird? What if they go through my drawers? A.A. Chaudhuri clearly had the exact same intrusive thought, except she actually did something with it  she wrote this brilliantly twisty, deliciously paranoid book. The setup pulled me in immediately. A couple, marking their tenth wedding anniversary, swap homes for a week  partly for a change of scenery, partly to paper over cracks in a marriage already strained by something ou...

  Review: Her Beautiful Secret - J.S Ellis - September 2026 There's a particular kind of book that gets its hooks into you from the very first page, and Her Beautiful Secret is exactly that kind of read. I picked it up expecting a straightforward thriller and instead found myself curled up on the sofa, tea going cold beside me, utterly unable to put it down. The story opens with Jade, a young woman whose relationship with an older boyfriend brings her parents storming into a hotel room, convinced she's throwing her life away for a man who doesn't love her. What follows is a shocking, visceral opening that sets the tone for everything to come ,Jade's parents are killed, and we're left reeling before the story has even properly begun. We meet Detective Lydia Falzon, brought in to interview Jade, and as the story unfolds through her eyes, we realise this isn't just Jade's story , it's Lydia's too. As Jade speaks, Lydia is pulled back into her own past...

VBT# Review- Nourish - Laura Baggaley - July 2026 Imagine a world where nobody eats. No Sunday roasts, no warm toast, no biscuit dunked in tea. Instead there are liquid injections and vitamin pills, and a generation of people who wouldn't know what taste is. That's the world of Laura Baggaley's Nourish, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. Our hero is Cal, who lives in a post-food society where people receive what's known as Nutritional Provision. It's tidy and efficient, and everyone accepts it as simply how things are. Then Cal's father dies, and he's sent to a fancy boarding school. It's there that he finds a rare edible substance, something that shouldn't exist, and it makes him question everything he's ever been told about nourishment. What I loved most is how the book gets you thinking about the small, ordinary things we take for granted. The smell of something baking, the way a meal brings people to a table, the comfort of ...

Review: Inventing Mr. Darcy - Susanna Craig - September 2026 Confession time: I picked this one up because I, too, am the kind of person who would name a cat after Mr. Bingley. So when I met Elle a grad student whose entire dissertation, reading life, and general worldview orbit Jane Austen  I felt instantly, embarrassingly seen. Elle's world is a cozy, familiar one. She's deep in her research on Pride and Prejudice, her cat Bing Bong (no relation to the sweet elephant from Inside Out ,  though I did have to do a double take) is curled up nearby, and Austen is basically the sun her whole life orbits. Then, one late night in the university archives, working on the AUSTEN-C database, a geomagnetic storm rips through the sky. Flash. Bang. And Elle wakes up in a world where Jane Austen never existed at all. This is where the book really won me over. It's not just "no Austen" as a throwaway premise Susanna Craig actually follows the ripple effects. No Hallmark Chan...

Review: The Last Eight Hours - S.C Shannon - September 2026 There's something deliciously unsettling about a book that opens with blood already spilled and a mind already blank, and The Last Eight Hours wastes no time pulling you into that unease. I curled up with this one expecting a straightforward thriller, and instead got tangled in a web I'm still thinking about days later  the kind of read that makes you want to text a friend at midnight just to say "you HAVE to read this." We meet Tessa in the worst possible moment of her life: sore, disoriented, and standing over the bodies of her husband and his business partner. She can't remember the last eight hours. She doesn't know if she did this. Honestly, neither do we, and that shared confusion is what makes the opening so gripping , we're figuring it out right alongside her. From there, we read as Tessa returns home to Cascade Bay, falling into a whirlwind romance with the charming Grayson, and meet...

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# Review - Where There's Smoke - Book #2 Haunted Paint Store Mystery - E.J Copperman - August 2026 There's something about picking up a new Laura Meehan mystery that feels like coming home , kettle on, cardigan on, the promise of trouble that's cozy rather than terrifying. Where There's Smoke delivers exactly that, and then quietly sneaks in something with real teeth. The premise pulled me in before I'd even cracked the spine: someone's setting fire to the Sea Breeze Public Library, and the suspects all seem to circle back to the same simmering fight so many small towns are having right now  who gets to decide what belongs on the shelves. EJ Copperman doesn't hammer you over the head with the banned-books angle, but it's there, woven into every conversation Laura has as a library volunteer, every side-eye between neighbors who used to just wave at each other over the mailbox. It gives the book a warmth of a different kind , the ache of watching a com...