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. ...

  Review: The Weekend Guests - Liza North - January 2025 There's a particular kind of dread that comes from watching old friends reunite while knowing, as the reader, that not everyone is who they claim to be anymore. Liza North taps straight into that feeling in The Weekend Guests, and honestly, I was hooked from the very first postcard. Five old university friends - Aline, Sienna, Rob, Michael, and Brandon  haven't all been in a room together for years. Now they're gathering at Aline's stunning clifftop house in Dorset, the kind of setting that practically begs to be photographed for an estate agent's brochure, right up until you remember someone in this group might be capable of murder. There's wine, there's the slightly awkward business of meeting each other's partners for the first time, there's a sitter minding the kids so the grown-ups can relax. It should be idyllic. It is not idyllic. Because underneath the reunion warmth sits somethi...

Review: Dark Poison - Book #1 Dark Brothers Series - Bec Botefuhr/Bella Jewel - March 2013 Scrolling through my Kindle the other night, I was in the mood for something older, something that felt like coming home. That's when I clicked on Dark Poison by Bec Botefuhr. The cover I remember is different from the one floating around now , mine was the self-published OG version, sitting on my Kindle since 2013, patiently waiting for me to fall back into it. And fall back into it I did. Reading this book was like stepping into a time machine set to 2013, back when indie authors were just beginning to find their footing and the market hadn't yet been flooded with the endless sameness we see today. This was a world where writers released books because they had a story to tell, not because they were pumping them out on a conveyor belt like James Patterson. It was also a world before Fifty Shades of Grey changed everything, before dark romance and erotica fiction became the juggernaut gen...

Review: Lost in the Fire - Robin Mahle - July 2026 This is the third of Robin Mahle's books I've picked up through the Zooloos Book Tours, and after enjoying the first two so much, there was no way I was passing this one by when I saw it on offer. There's something lovely about finding an author whose books you can trust to deliver, and Mahle has become one of those for me. Lost in the Fire doesn't ease you in gently. It opens with real force, the main character's house going up in flames, and within the first few pages we lose both her husband and her son to the fire. I'll admit this part gave me pause, as a mother myself I kept thinking, surely your first instinct is to go for your child? It sat a little uneasily with me, but it didn't stop me turning the pages. Avery wakes up in hospital afterwards with amnesia, and this is where the story really gets its hooks into you. She can't remember being married. She can't remember having a son. And now ...