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...

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...

Review: The Idaho Murders - James Patterson and Vicky Ward - July 2025 There are some books you pick up out of curiosity, and then there are books you pick up because you simply have to. For me, The Idaho Murders was firmly the latter. True crime has been a long-time love of mine, and James Patterson has been on my shelves for years, so when I heard these two forces had come together to tackle the Moscow, Idaho case, I knew I'd be settling in with this one sooner rather than later. I followed this case closely as it unfolded in the news, piecing together fragments here and there the way we all did. But nothing quite prepared me for how much more there was to learn. James Patterson and Vicky Ward have done something genuinely remarkable here, drawing on over 300 exclusive interviews to build a picture of what happened on that terrible night of 13th November 2022, when four young lives were taken far too soon. What struck me most, curled up with this book over several evenings, was...

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....

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 ...