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...

Review: All The Lies They Told - Robin Mahle - August 2025 There's a particular kind of dread that comes from watching two families you already suspect are hiding something. Robin Mahle taps straight into it in All The Lies They Told, and I devoured every page. I'll admit I came into this one with high expectations. I've toured several of Robin Mahle's thrillers now through Zooloos Book Tours , and she's never once let me down  but this book, loosely inspired by the real-life Delphi case, felt like it demanded even more from her, and she delivered. The setup is deceptively simple: Lexi Brewer and Skye Metcalf were once inseparable, the kind of friends who walked home from school together sharing secrets like currency. Now they barely speak. Their families barely speak. And then, on one ordinary evening, both girls simply don't come home. What follows isn't just a missing-persons investigation, it's an excavation. Robin Mahle peels back layer after lay...

Review: Dig Two Graves - Gigi Johnston - September 2024 I'll be honest with you, dear readers, I finished this book at 1am, wide awake, silently cheering for a killer. That's not something I say often, but Dig Two Graves earns it. Gigi Johnston opens with a premise that guts you before the story even gets going: two children, a boy and a girl, trapped in a children's home that was supposed to protect them and instead became the place that broke them. The boy escapes. Years pass. He comes back  not as a victim, but as a reckoning. One by one, the adults who hurt him start turning up dead, and I found myself flipping pages hoping he'd get to the next name on his list before anyone stopped him. Gigi Johnston has a rare gift for writing vigilante justice that never feels gratuitous, every death lands with weight, but never sympathy for the ones who deserved it. Meanwhile, on the other side of the case, Officers Brady and Jones are doing what good detectives do: followi...

Review: When the Moon Hatched - Book #1 Moonfall Series - Sarah A. Parker - November 2024 I'll be honest upfront: romantasy isn't usually my genre. But this one had been sitting on my shelf staring at me for long enough that I finally caved, and I'm glad I did. From the first few chapters, When the Moon Hatched pulled me in with how effortlessly it reads. There's nothing clunky or overwrought about the prose here , it just flows, chapter after chapter, in a way that makes it dangerously easy to tell yourself "just one more" long after you meant to put it down. If you've read Throne of Glass, you'll probably feel the same familiar hum I did. The setup centers on two women who turn out to be long-lost royalty, both reshaped into assassins after an accident that left them with amnesia, both quietly fighting to protect the very people who don't know who they really are. It's a premise that leans into tropes I've seen before, but Sarah A. ...