#VBT - Review: You'll Be Sorry - Liz Alterman - August 2026 Pour yourself something cold, pull up a chair, because I need to talk to you about this one. I picked up You'll Be Sorry the way I pick up most revenge stories with a little thrill in my stomach and a promise to myself that I'd only read "just one chapter" before bed. We all know how that promise usually goes. Amelia Montgomery is turning forty, and instead of candles and cake on her mind, she's flipping through a magazine when Ethan Blackmore 's face stops her cold. Ethan:  the man who broke her, humiliated her, and then had the audacity to build a whole shiny new life while she picked up the pieces of the old one. You know the type. Maybe you've even had your own Ethan. I loved the idea of Amelia. A woman who clawed her way back from heartbreak and built something real,  a business, a self, a whole second life is exactly the kind of protagonist I want to root for at my kitchen tabl...

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...

VBT Review - She Stole My Baby - Jessica Huntley - July 2026 Grab a cuppa and get comfy, because I have another one for you from an author who has fast become one of my absolute favourites  Jessica Huntley. I've had the pleasure of being part of a few of her book tours now, and every single time I come away thinking "how does she keep doing this to me?" She Stole My Baby is no exception, and honestly, it might just be one of her best yet. If you've hung around this blog for any length of time, you'll know my weakness. Found family ? Yes please. Identical twins ? Sign me up. Mistaken identity that spirals into absolute chaos? I am there. This book ticks every single one of those boxes and then wraps them up in a thriller so tense I had to keep reminding myself to breathe. We meet Poppy first,  a woman who did the thing so many of us dream of doing and quietly worry we can't: she built a career and became a mum. A one night stand left her with her daughter ...

Review:  Red Flags - J.E Rowney - September 2025 There's a particular kind of magic that happens when you're scrolling on your Kindle, half looking for something new and half just killing time before bed, and a cover reaches out and grabs you by the collar. That's exactly what happened with Red Flags. I'm a sucker for a good thriller, and I love it when fiction gets a bit edgy, so the vibe pulled me in straight away. What I didn't expect was for this book to take me somewhere so much deeper than I'd bargained for, curled up with a cup of tea, expecting a bit of drama and instead getting a proper, sit-with-you-after-the-last-page kind of read. At the heart of it all is Clara, and honestly, my heart went out to her from the very first chapter. She's the sort of woman who just wants what most of us want, someone to build a life with, a hand to hold, a person who chooses her and keeps choosing her. But love hasn't been kind to Clara. Every date is a fresh ...

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...