Review: Little Ghost's Summerween - Maggie Edkins Willis - April 2026  Little Ghost has attended his very first birthday party and decides he wants one of his own. His friend Anya gives him the most beautifully simple advice: the party should celebrate what Little Ghost loves most. And of course, what Little Ghost loves most is Halloween - bats, black cats, candy corn, pumpkins, the whole gloriously spooky lot. The small snag? It's the middle of summer. What unfolds is a genuinely delightful little story about identity, creativity, and the joy of refusing to be boxed in by expectations. Maggie Edkins Willis has a wonderful instinct for the interior logic of childhood like of course you can have Halloween in summer. Why wouldn't you? The solution Little Ghost lands on (a "Summerween" party) is exactly the kind of lateral thinking that picture books do best: it validates kids who feel like they don't quite fit the calendar of normal celebrations. The illustr...

Review: Our Last Resort - Clemence Michallon - July 2025 I'll be honest with you when I picked up Our Last Resort almost entirely because the blurb whispered Waco and Jonestown to me. A cult in upstate New York. A dramatic escape. Siblings carrying the weight of something unspeakable. I was practically already in my reading chair before I'd finished the synopsis. Sometimes a premise is just that good.  The flashback sequences to Frida and Gabriel's cloistered upbringing have that eerie, suffocating quality that makes cult narratives so compulsively readable , the kind of world where the walls feel like they're slowly closing in even when everything looks perfectly ordered from the outside. That tension is real, and it's the engine that kept me turning pages. The present-day setup has promise too. The Ara Hotel  a luxury desert retreat in Escalante, Utah is a gorgeous setting, all heat-shimmer and isolation. A dead woman. A powerful older husband. A brother with a ...

Synopsis: More Than This - Layla Emmerson - March 2026 At that moment, I wished I could be someone else. Someone who wasn’t scared to be touched by desire and feel the flames of passion burning through her. Bound by her past, Harper, a romance author, hides in the novel she now struggles to write. However, when a non-negotiable ultimatum brings Reid into her life, it changes everything. Not only is he a successful author, he’s also the ultimate alpha male. With an impenetrably dark demeanour, he appears emotionally detached... an enigma. Whilst embarking on a research venture of a more intimate nature, the pair become close and soon the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred. They break the rules, and when unexpected feelings develop, Harper becomes the greatest weakness he never saw coming. Reid knows the secret he hides will break her all over again. As Harper struggles to let go of her past, Reid is forced to confront his. When past becomes present, they disco...

Review: The Mirror House Girls - Faith Gardner - January 2025 Winona is looking for somewhere to belong after her grandmother dies and the guy she was dating turned out to be married and have a family. When she meets Dakota at a grief group, she is invited to check out the eccentric Mirror House. Faith Gardner turns that achingly ordinary human need into the engine of a slow-burn cult thriller that gets under your skin long before it scares you. Simon Spellmeyer is  a charismatic psychologist whose self-improvement protocols feel plausible enough to make you uneasy about your own susceptibility. He stays dangerously reasonable for most of the novel, which is exactly what makes the story work. As someone who has read almost everything Faith Gardner has written, I recognised her signature move here: making you understand, page by page, how intelligent people end up somewhere they never intended to go. The first half of the novel is its strongest. The atmosphere of Mir...

Review: When She Returned - Lucinda Berry - October 2019 Cult fiction is my absolute catnip. Throw in a missing persons case where the person actually comes back, changed, silent, carrying secrets  and I am completely, helplessly hooked. When She Returned by Lucinda Berry had me at the premise and kept me hostage for the entire read. Kate Bennett vanished from a Montana parking lot eleven years ago, leaving behind her husband and a young daughter who has since had to rebuild her entire world without a mother. Then, just as suddenly as she disappeared, Kate reappears dishevelled, clutching an infant, screaming for help at a gas station. Investigators suspect cult involvement. Her family suspects something they can't yet name. And Kate herself barely resembles the woman she once was. What Lucinda Berry does so cleverly here is resist the easy reunion. There is no tearful, healing embrace at the centre of this story. Kate's return is a rupture, not a resoluti...

  Review: Bitter Harvest - Book #2 A GreenHouse Mystery Series - Wendy Tyson - March 2017 If you're not yet acquainted with Megan Sawyer and the rolling hills of Winsome, Pennsylvania, then consider this your warmest and most urgent invitation. Bitter Harvest, the second book in Wendy Tyson's Greenhouse Mystery series, is the kind of cozy mystery that makes you want to pull on a flannel shirt, wrap your hands around a mug of cider, and cancel every plan you have for the rest of the day. Washington Acres has survived its first year, the farm café has blossomed into the heartbeat of the local community, and  be still my heart Winsome's brooding, kilt-worthy Scottish veterinarian Dr. Denver Finn is making house calls that have absolutely nothing to do with livestock. Life feels good for Megan. But Wendy Tyson, as any self-respecting mystery author should, refuses to let autumn stay golden for long. When the owner of the town pub Otto dies in what appears to be...

Review: The Good Ones - Polly Stewart - June 2023 I'll be upfront: I picked this one up on a quiet Sunday with the intention of just reading a chapter or two. A few hours later I surfaced, bleary-eyed and thoroughly unsettled. That should tell you everything you need to know about Polly Stewart's The Good Ones. Twenty years ago, Nicola shared what sounds like a perfect, golden day at the lake with her closest friend Lauren,  a rare, child-free afternoon that felt like a gift. When Nicola declined to stay overnight and drove home to her mum, she had no idea it would be the last time she'd ever see her. The next morning she returned to find blood and no Lauren  and a town that eventually decided she'd simply walked away from her life. I found that part particularly chilling: that a woman can disappear and the community's answer is just to shrug and move on. Nicola never bought the official story, but she also couldn't stay. The weight of sm...