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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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VBT# Her Beautiful Secret - J.S Ellis

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  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...
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Review: The Idaho Murders - James Patterson and Vicky Ward

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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...
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