Review: The Single Father - Jade Lee Wright - October 2026 Being part of the Zooloos Book Tour family has given me the chance to read some of Jade Lee Wright’s earlier titles, and I’ve enjoyed every one. This latest caught my eye straight away because I have a soft spot for any book with a Nanny or Au Pair at its heart. Funnily enough, I very nearly became a Nanny myself! I was all set to head to Nanny College in Wellington until my Dad hired a career counsellor to talk me out of it. I’ll never know whether I’d have been any good at it, but I do love living vicariously through fictional ones. Matilda, or Tilly, has just lost Marc, the love of her life, and is trying to find her footing again. She takes a position as a Nanny in the Peak District, an area she and Marc always dreamed of visiting, hoping for a fresh start. There she meets Edward and his two children, Sage and Ryan. Everything goes beautifully at first, until a hike takes a terrifying turn and Tilly is pushed. She wakes...

Review: A Thousand Perfect Lies - Monica Murphy - March 2026 Last year, I decided it was going to be my Monica Murphy year, and I happily worked my way through her Lancaster Prep series. Oh, how I fell in love with her writing! So when I spotted a brand new release from her, there was no question that it was going straight onto my reading pile, and I’m delighted to say it didn’t disappoint. If you’re a fan of Karen McManus and Sara Shepard and their twisty YA thrillers, pop the kettle on and settle in, because A Thousand Perfect Lies is right up your street. The story centres on Billie, whose parents divorced when she was young. Billie stayed in the US with her mum, while her sister Izzy went off to the UK with their dad. The sisters built separate lives, but they kept their bond alive through phone calls, weaving in and out of each other’s days. Now Izzy needs her sister more than ever. She’s lying in a coma, her best friend is dead, and the police believe Izzy is the murderer. Bil...

Review: One Missing Girl - Kristi Belcamino - October 2026 Three girls were on their way to big dreams and college, but when a night goes wrong - only two of those girls will find their way home and one will remain missing until a few days later. Years ago, Sofia had a family until one day she found a dead body in her basement and her family exploded and her father went to prison and she escaped her mother who blamed her for her brother's death.  As the book goes along, and Kate is considered missing - Sofia believes her past has caught up with her and this is somehow related especially when she finds hidden letters from Sofia's mother to Kate , however what if Sofia didn't realise that the danger wasn't her family but something closer and someone she cared about and this book showed us that sometimes the threats and the dangers are the one's right under our noses, the ones that we never consider as dangerous or ones that we would trust our lives with as we thought...

VBT# Review - The Woman In My Home - D.L Fisher - October 2026 The Woman In My Home opens with a moment I’m sure many of us would recognise: a message lights up on her husband’s phone, and she reads it. Of course she does, who wouldn’t? She’s turning thirty in two weeks and thinks she’s about to be surprised with a birthday gift, so she’s thrilled to learn he’s bought them their dream log cabin in the Poconos, tucked beside a private lake. But when she drives out to see it while he’s supposedly away on a work trip, his truck is already there. And so is another woman. What a hook! The double life storyline is one of my all-time favourite themes, and I’m always on the lookout for a new take on it. What makes this one different is that the woman he truly loves is the one who doesn’t have his children. Usually it’s the other way round, with the other woman as the secret, and the family at home. DL Fisher turns that on its head, and it made me look at every character in a completely new li...

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...

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...

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 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: Thornbird - E. Kennedy - June 2026 I had high hopes for Thornbird by E. Kennedy because, honestly, the premise sounded like it had been written specifically for me. A serial killer father? A mother who was one of his victims? A daughter who changes her name and creates a whole new identity to escape the shadow of his crimes? Come on  that is basically catnip for a thriller reader! Ten years after infamous serial killer Gabriel Thorn was caught, Ryan Shipley returns to Starling, Tennessee, determined to keep her head down and her true identity hidden. Nobody can know who she really is or the connection she has to the notorious killer. But when fresh eyes begin digging into the old case, the secrets Ryan has worked so hard to bury start clawing their way back to the surface. Cryptic texts, unsettling coincidences and a chilling note all suggest that someone knows more than they should. And as questions surrounding Gabriel Thorn's crimes begin resurfacing, Ryan finds herself r...

Review: My Twin Sister - Alesha Dykema - August 2026 There are some thriller tropes that I just can’t resist, and long-lost family members, missing people and someone coming back from the dead are definitely high on my list. So when I picked up My Twin Sister by Alesha Dykema, I was immediately intrigued. Because how would you react if the twin sister you believed had died eighteen years ago suddenly walked into your father’s funeral? That is exactly what happens to Gen. Grace was supposed to have drowned when the sisters were just nineteen. Gen has spent nearly two decades believing that her twin is gone, so seeing Grace standing there, alive and well, is understandably a huge shock. But the surprises don’t stop there. Grace reveals that she suffered from amnesia and has only just remembered who she really is. Except Gen doesn’t believe her. And there’s a very good reason for that. Grace was once in love with Gen’s husband, Wyatt. Suddenly, Gen is living the life that Grace once dream...