Review: The Mirror House Girls - Faith Gardner - January 2025 Winona is looking for somewhere to belong after her grandmother dies and the guy she was dating turned out to be married and have a family. When she meets Dakota at a grief group, she is invited to check out the eccentric Mirror House. Faith Gardner turns that achingly ordinary human need into the engine of a slow-burn cult thriller that gets under your skin long before it scares you. Simon Spellmeyer is  a charismatic psychologist whose self-improvement protocols feel plausible enough to make you uneasy about your own susceptibility. He stays dangerously reasonable for most of the novel, which is exactly what makes the story work. As someone who has read almost everything Faith Gardner has written, I recognised her signature move here: making you understand, page by page, how intelligent people end up somewhere they never intended to go. The first half of the novel is its strongest. The atmosphere of Mir...

Review: When She Returned - Lucinda Berry - October 2019 Cult fiction is my absolute catnip. Throw in a missing persons case where the person actually comes back, changed, silent, carrying secrets  and I am completely, helplessly hooked. When She Returned by Lucinda Berry had me at the premise and kept me hostage for the entire read. Kate Bennett vanished from a Montana parking lot eleven years ago, leaving behind her husband and a young daughter who has since had to rebuild her entire world without a mother. Then, just as suddenly as she disappeared, Kate reappears dishevelled, clutching an infant, screaming for help at a gas station. Investigators suspect cult involvement. Her family suspects something they can't yet name. And Kate herself barely resembles the woman she once was. What Lucinda Berry does so cleverly here is resist the easy reunion. There is no tearful, healing embrace at the centre of this story. Kate's return is a rupture, not a resoluti...

  Review: Bitter Harvest - Book #2 A GreenHouse Mystery Series - Wendy Tyson - March 2017 If you're not yet acquainted with Megan Sawyer and the rolling hills of Winsome, Pennsylvania, then consider this your warmest and most urgent invitation. Bitter Harvest, the second book in Wendy Tyson's Greenhouse Mystery series, is the kind of cozy mystery that makes you want to pull on a flannel shirt, wrap your hands around a mug of cider, and cancel every plan you have for the rest of the day. Washington Acres has survived its first year, the farm café has blossomed into the heartbeat of the local community, and  be still my heart Winsome's brooding, kilt-worthy Scottish veterinarian Dr. Denver Finn is making house calls that have absolutely nothing to do with livestock. Life feels good for Megan. But Wendy Tyson, as any self-respecting mystery author should, refuses to let autumn stay golden for long. When the owner of the town pub Otto dies in what appears to be...

Review: The Good Ones - Polly Stewart - June 2023 I'll be upfront: I picked this one up on a quiet Sunday with the intention of just reading a chapter or two. A few hours later I surfaced, bleary-eyed and thoroughly unsettled. That should tell you everything you need to know about Polly Stewart's The Good Ones. Twenty years ago, Nicola shared what sounds like a perfect, golden day at the lake with her closest friend Lauren,  a rare, child-free afternoon that felt like a gift. When Nicola declined to stay overnight and drove home to her mum, she had no idea it would be the last time she'd ever see her. The next morning she returned to find blood and no Lauren  and a town that eventually decided she'd simply walked away from her life. I found that part particularly chilling: that a woman can disappear and the community's answer is just to shrug and move on. Nicola never bought the official story, but she also couldn't stay. The weight of sm...

Review: Everyone Who Can Forgive Me is Dead - Jenny Hollander - February 2024 There are books you plan to read, and books that find their way to you. This one arrived as a happy accident . a Bookstagram raffle win that led to a small pile of vouchers and the chance to finally pull a wishlist title off the shelf. Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead by Jenny Hollander was one of those deliberate choices, and I can say with certainty it was the right one. "She walked out alive and covered in blood. What she couldn't walk out with was the truth." The novel centres on Charlie (Charlotte), a woman who, during her journalism studies in college, survived a horrific event that would come to be known as the Scarlett Christmas Massacre a night when her friends were stabbed and she was the one left standing, bloodied and shattered. In the years since, Charlie has done what so many trauma survivors do: she has sealed the memory off, smoothed it into a shape she can live with, and move...

VBT# Review - Forever Reckless -Book #1 Fourth and Forever Series -  Eve L. Mitchell - June 2026 Right, pull up a chair and let me tell you about my latest read, because this one has been living in my head rent-free since I turned the final page. Forever Reckless by Eve L. Mitchell came my way through Zooloos Book Tours, and I'll be the first to admit  it's a little different from my usual picks. But honestly? Sometimes different is exactly what you need. You know the type of book I mean, don't you? That delicious new adult sports college romance where the golden boy on campus turns out to be far more complicated than his billboard smile suggests. Eve L. Mitchell has taken everything we love about the genre,  the tension, the forbidden pull, the slow unravelling of carefully built walls  and wrapped it around a story with real bite to it. Our hero, Dante Spence, is the kind of man who looks like he has it all. Quarterback. National champion. Star of ...

Review: Morbidly Yours - Book #1 Love In Galway Series - Ivy Fairbanks - July 2023 There are books you pick up because someone raves about them, and then there are books that simply reach out and grab you from across the shelf. Morbidly Yours was firmly the latter for me. Something about that title paired with that cover had me utterly charmed before I'd read a single word  and I'm so glad I followed that instinct, because this one turned out to be a real gem. At the heart of the story is Callum Flannelly, an introverted mortician with a deadline that has nothing to do with death certificates: marry before his 35th birthday or lose his undertaking business.  Enter Lark Thompson, a vivacious American animator who has come to Galway to embrace life and who is absolutely not thrilled about finding herself next door to a funeral home. Their odd-couple dynamic is delightful from the very first page. Now, I have to talk about Callum, because honestly? He stole my whole heart. He...

Review: The Girls Before - Kate Alice Marshall - February 2026 I've been a fan of Kate Alice Marshall for a while now , she has a real knack for that unsettling, atmospheric tension that makes you want to keep reading with all the lights on so when The Girls Before popped up on the Libby app, I didn't hesitate. Into my queue it went, and I settled in with a cuppa and high hopes. The premise is genuinely gripping. A girl called Stranger, trapped alone in a dark basement, rationing her last scraps of food and water, with only the desperate scrawlings of girls who came before her scratched into the walls for company. Meanwhile, Audrey, a search and rescue expert carrying the weight of her best friend Janie's long-ago disappearance  stumbles onto evidence in the forest that pulls her into decades of buried secrets tied to the town's most powerful family. There's even a local legend woven through it all: a forest witch who saves girls from bad men - this gave me Urban L...

Review: The Second First Chance - Blakely Bennett - March 2016 We all have those months, don't we? The ones where nothing on your shelf seems to call to you, where you find yourself scrolling endlessly through your Kindle at midnight, jabbing hopefully at titles and praying something sticks. That was very much my life lately,  a proper reading slump that had me wondering if the magic had gone out of it entirely. And then a title caught my eye, and something just said yes. That's how I stumbled into The Second First Chance by Blakely Bennett, and I am ever so glad I did. This book pressed on a question I suspect many of us carry quietly in our hearts: what if you could have just a little more time with the person you love? Jayden's husband Callahan is killed in a car accident on their twentieth wedding anniversary, an ordinary crossing of a road that changes everything, forever. It is the kind of loss that hits you right in the chest as a reader, because it is...

Review: Monstrous Souls - Rebecca Kelly - June 2020 You know those moments where you're curled up on the sofa, scrolling through your Kindle with a cup of tea going cold beside you, just searching for something that grabs you? That was me when I stumbled across Monstrous Souls by Rebecca Kelly. Honestly, the title had me thinking I was about to dive into something dark and gothic  maybe even a YA horror. I was very much picturing brooding teenagers and supernatural beasties. Oh, how wrong I was, and oh, how pleasantly surprised I turned out to be! Monstrous Souls opens with a gut punch. Heidi wakes up in hospital as a teenager to discover that her best friend has been murdered and her sister has been kidnapped. As if that weren't devastating enough, Heidi herself  assumed dead has survived, but not unscathed. She's left with amnesia, the memories of that terrible night completely out of reach. It's the kind of opening that makes you sit up straighter and forget your te...