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...

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...

  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...

Review: The Man in the Photo - McGarvey Black - September 2026 There's a particular kind of book that gets under my skin before I've even turned the first page, and it's this one: stories about people living double lives, walking away from everything they knew, and building someone new out of the wreckage. I don't know what it is about reinvention that fascinates me so much ,  maybe it's the fantasy of a clean slate, maybe it's the horror of realizing you never really knew someone at all  but The Man in the Photo delivers that obsession in spades. The setup alone had me settled into my reading chair with a cup of tea, utterly hooked. Our narrator is doing something so ordinary, so achingly relatable  scrolling through her daughter's holiday photos from Australia  when the ground shifts beneath her. There, in the background of a stranger's snapshot: a blue shirt, a gray beard, a face she buried over twenty years ago. Her fiancé. The father of her child....

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: 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: 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: The Stolen Twin - Jade Lee Wright - July 2026 A split second is all it can take to change a life forever, and that truth sits heavily at the heart of The Stolen Twin by Jade Lee Wright. This is one of those stories that quietly settles into your bones as you read, wrapping itself around the idea that family, trust, and truth are far more fragile than we ever like to believe. Bella’s world is already full when the story begins. She and her husband have just adopted twin girls, and life is a blur of nappies, exhaustion, and love. So when she finally steps out for a Christmas party, it feels like a small moment of normality , something light after months of giving everything to motherhood. But that fragile balance is shattered in an instant when her husband calls to say one of the twins is missing. From there, the novel stretches across fourteen years of grief, unanswered questions, and a family living in the shadow of absence. Robyn is gone, and Bella and her husband are left rai...

Review: Until She Dies - Book #3 Noelle Marshall Series - Kendra Elliot - September 2026 One of my favourite parts of being a book reviewer and blogger is getting to read books before they're even out in the world yet. I was scrolling through my Kindle the other night, looking for something to dive into, when I spotted a Kendra Elliot title I hadn't picked up yet. It had been a while since I'd read one of hers, but she's one of those thriller authors I trust completely no matter what she publishes, I know I'm going to love it. One of the things I adore most about Kendra's books is how she weaves in crossover characters. As you move from book to book, you might suddenly find yourself reunited with someone whose story you've already read, like running into an old friend. It makes her world feel lived-in and connected, and it's part of why I keep coming back. Until She Dies opens with Crystal, who's convinced her husband Gage is cheating on her. Wha...