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VBT# The Woman in My Home - D.L Fisher

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VBT# Review - The Woman In My Home - D.L Fisher - October 2026 The Woman In My Home opens with a moment I’m sure many of us would recognise: a message lights up on her husband’s phone, and she reads it. Of course she does, who wouldn’t? She’s turning thirty in two weeks and thinks she’s about to be surprised with a birthday gift, so she’s thrilled to learn he’s bought them their dream log cabin in the Poconos, tucked beside a private lake. But when she drives out to see it while he’s supposedly away on a work trip, his truck is already there. And so is another woman. What a hook! The double life storyline is one of my all-time favourite themes, and I’m always on the lookout for a new take on it. What makes this one different is that the woman he truly loves is the one who doesn’t have his children. Usually it’s the other way round, with the other woman as the secret, and the family at home. DL Fisher turns that on its head, and it made me look at every character in a completely new li...
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Book Spotlight - The Last Time I Saw Her - Rhiannon Barnsley

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Synopsis: The Last Time I Saw Her - Rhiannon Bardsley - October 2026 The stranger appeared in her dreams. Now she’s invading her life. Sage has a recurring nightmare: a woman she doesn’t know is drowning, fighting desperately as the dark water closes over her. It’s unsettling, but Sage shrugs it off when she wakes. Until she sees the same woman in a South London supermarket. Her name is Lara, she is a psychology student and small-time influencer. And Sage is certain—she is about to die. Sage feels she has to do everything she can to save Lara, and slowly, quietly, she begins to infiltrate her life—following her online, engineering a chance encounter, earning her trust. When Lara confides she's being stalked, Sage knows she’s right—the nightmare is coming true. But what can Sage actually do? She can’t tell Lara she was appearing in her dreams before they ever met—that would sound insane. All she can do is watch over her, try to protect her. Then, as she gets ever closer to Lara, Sag...
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Review: Five Voices - Tamara Moss

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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...
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VBT# Good Twin, Bad Twin - Renita D'Silva

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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...
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Review: Schoolbus Graveyard Volume #1 - Red

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  Review: Schoolbus Graveyard - Volume #1 - Red - June 2026 There's a particular kind of tired that makes a proper novel feel like too much. You want to read, your brain just isn't up for heavy lifting. That's when I reach for a graphic novel, and Schoolbus Graveyard turned out to be exactly the itch-scratcher I was after. Ashlyn is a loner, and she's perfectly happy that way. Then a school field trip goes horribly wrong, and suddenly she and a handful of classmates can see a monstrous phantom that nobody else can. The good news is it can't hurt them. The bad news is that at midnight the sky turns red, and everything changes. What I loved most is the pacing. Volume One collects episodes 1 to 32, and it moves along at such a clip that I kept telling myself "just one more chapter" while my tea went cold beside me. The story doesn't waste your time. Each episode nudges you along with a new scare, a new clue about the curse, or a new wobble in the ...
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VBT# Finders Keepers - Jessica Huntley

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Review: Finders Keepers - Jessica Huntley - September 2026 Some books have you reaching for a cuppa and settling into the couch. This one had me reaching for a cuppa and glancing nervously at the door. Finders Keepers opens with Mel, Liv and Jennie, three lifelong friends who would do anything for each other. When Mel's mum passes away, a hidden key leads them to a storage unit. Inside they find more than £100,000 in cash, and a body. And because the girls are in desperate need of money, they make a decision that will haunt them: keep the cash, say nothing. Reading that opening, I couldn't help thinking of the true New Zealand case from a few years back, when an Auckland family bought an old storage shed at auction, opened it up, and found two suitcases with human remains inside. They stumbled on a fortune too, and they've been paying the price ever since. It gave me a proper shiver. Real life, it turns out, can be every bit as unsettling as fiction, and it made Jessica H...
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VBT# The Home Swap - A. A Chaudhuri

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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...
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