Review: TradWife - Michelle Brandon - August 2026 Could you ever be a tradwife? I’ll be honest, from the outside it all looks so cosy and homely, with the baking, the tidy kitchen and the table full of family. But I can’t help feeling there’s pressure bubbling away underneath. Cooking, cleaning and serving my family around the clock simply isn’t for me. I’m definitely not the homemaker type, and I’ve got far too much ambition for other things, like a potential career. So I was really excited to dive into this paperback ARC, especially after hearing such good things. Tradwife peels back the curtain on the hidden lives behind the perfectly polished aprons, and it’s another story fuelled by revenge. Back in high school, where most of our characters were classmates, one student was bullied and presumed drowned. That night, the group made a pact: never speak of it, and if they absolutely had to, they’d all stick to the same story. Years later, a few of them still carry the memory, and it ...

Review: Nightshade - Book #1 Sorrowsong University - Autumn Woods - January 2025 Nightshade opens with a heartbreak that settled right into my chest. Ophelia Winters is the daughter of two hardworking parents: her dad a chef, her mum a gardener, both employed at Sorrowsong, the wealthy elite university on the hill. They always warned her to keep away from the place, never wanting her stuck in a world of ungrateful adults. Then one night, while Ophelia waits at home for them to return, their helicopter crashes in a fiery wreck and she loses them both. The whole thing is swiftly covered up, and nobody will answer her questions. So when a scholarship to Sorrowsong lands in her lap, Ophelia doesn’t hesitate. She wants the truth, and she wants revenge on the people who took everything she loved. I adored her. She’s spunky, stubborn and fiercely loyal to her parents’ memory, and I was rooting for her from the first chapter. Then there’s Alex. He’s already at Sorrowsong, and he simply canno...

  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: Across The Vanishing Sky - Book #1 Starlight Grove - Catherine Cowles - March 2026 I recently received this book as part of a bookstagram birthday group I belong to, and I have to say what a gift. It had been sitting on my wishlist and my want-to-read list for a while, so seeing it show up felt like fate finally giving me a nudge. I didn't know much going in, just that it was a small-town novel with a romantic suspense edge, and honestly, that was the perfect amount of mystery to start with. The story opens with our main character, Braedyn, hiking with her best friend Nova. They get separated for just a moment  and Nova vanishes without a trace. The police chalk it up to a bear attack or the river sweeping her away, but Braedyn knows in her gut that someone took her. My heart broke for her right from those first pages. Fast forward one year, and Braedyn has packed up her life and her son to move to Starlight Grove, determined to return to the spot where Nova disappeare...

Review: The River Runs Black - Book #2 North Country Novel - Tessa Wegert - October 2026 The River Runs Black drops us into the deceptively peaceful town of Alexandria Bay, nestled in New York's Thousand Islands region,  the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone, and nothing bad is supposed to happen. But when a teenager dies of a drug overdose around the same time as a record-breaking cocaine bust along the Canadian border, Investigator Tim Wellington and his team think they've caught a lucky break. Case closed, right? Wrong. The lab results throw everything sideways ,  the cocaine that killed that teenager doesn't match the cocaine from the bust. Which means there's a second, far more dangerous supply still moving through town, run by people willing to protect it at any cost. Suddenly Investigator Tim Wellington isn't just solving a crime  he's racing against a ticking clock, knowing the next casualty could be another local kid caught in the crossf...

Review: The Last Eight Hours - S.C Shannon - September 2026 There's something deliciously unsettling about a book that opens with blood already spilled and a mind already blank, and The Last Eight Hours wastes no time pulling you into that unease. I curled up with this one expecting a straightforward thriller, and instead got tangled in a web I'm still thinking about days later  the kind of read that makes you want to text a friend at midnight just to say "you HAVE to read this." We meet Tessa in the worst possible moment of her life: sore, disoriented, and standing over the bodies of her husband and his business partner. She can't remember the last eight hours. She doesn't know if she did this. Honestly, neither do we, and that shared confusion is what makes the opening so gripping , we're figuring it out right alongside her. From there, we read as Tessa returns home to Cascade Bay, falling into a whirlwind romance with the charming Grayson, and meet...

Review: Queen of Cambridge - Book #6 Queens of the Castle - Shakir Rashaan - February 2022 There are some books that feel like slipping into a favourite chair at home with a cup of tea beside you , familiar, comfortable, and filled with characters you’re always happy to catch up with. Queen of Cambridge by Shakir Rashaan gave me some of that feeling, particularly because of its connection to The Castle universe. Caressa is certainly a woman who knows what she wants. As a billionaire chocolatier and one of the biggest names in the confectionery world, she has built an impressive empire, but she isn’t content to sit back and admire what she has already achieved. She’s looking towards new ventures, new opportunities and, as we soon discover, new complications. Caressa is shrewd, determined and very much a woman who can hold her own. Of course, when business and pleasure become rather too closely intertwined, things start getting messy. Enter Ishmael , an international weapons dealer wit...

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: Repeat - Book #1 Larsen Brothers - Kylie Scott - April 2019 There's something so special about reading a book that landed in your hands as a birthday gift and getting to curl up with Repeat, sent to me by one of my beautiful book birthday groups on bookstagram, made this reading experience feel even warmer and more meaningful. Books really do taste sweeter when they come wrapped in friendship. Kylie Scott has long held a special place on my shelf as one of my favourite Australian New Adult authors. It all started years ago when I fell hopelessly in love with Mal from the Stage Dive series, and ever since, her name on a cover is enough to make me clear my schedule. Repeat opens with Clementine walking into a tattoo parlour, innocently asking if the owner did her tattoo completely unaware of the storm she's about to walk into. Turns out, she used to date the tattoo artist, Ed. They broke up, she walked away, and it shattered him. But here's the gut-punch: Clem doesn...

Review: Don't Answer the Phone - Miranda Rijks - March 2026 I'll be honest with you  the moment I spotted a new Miranda Rijks on my radar, I did a little happy dance right there in my kitchen. She is one of those authors who just gets the psychological thriller; the slow-burn dread, the creeping wrongness, the feeling that something terrible is coiling itself quietly around a perfectly ordinary life. So I settled into my favourite armchair with a cup of tea and absolutely no intention of moving until I'd turned the last page. Don't Answer the Phone begins with such a lovely, ordinary act of kindness. Daniella steps in to help elderly Peggy on a Boston street, the sort of small good deed we'd all like to think we'd do. But as any seasoned thriller reader knows, no good deed goes unpunished  and into Daniella's life steps Lucas, Peggy's son, all charm and smouldering attention. After years of feeling invisible beside her distant husband Grant, the pull is...