Plot or Premise

A struggling writer gets hired under somewhat odd circumstances to finish a popular series by another author who has become incapacitated. She moves into the house with the author, her husband, and child, and starts to develop feelings for the husband.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

I confess upfront that I am not a giant fan of Colleen Hoover nor romance thrillers, but the premise of an author taking over a popular series was too intriguing to resist. I tend to skip the genre as I find too often that the “thriller” part strays too close to domestic violence porn even if you know the woman will win in the end.

I wasn’t wrong about the intrigue of Lowen Ashleigh taking over a writing series from Verity Crawford. When she’s in the writer’s realm, struggling with figuring out how to advance the series and tell a “Verity-style” story, the pages sing. It’s great. When she finds what appears to be a cross between an unpublished biography and a personal journal of Verity’s, Lowen’s story starts to morph into multiple strands of wanting to fill in for Verity, the person, not just the author.

I’m not big on romance unless it’s more two people working on something in a will they or won’t they style of romantic tension, while this one is more isolation together. And while I see Lowen’s morphing into caring about Jeremy (she’s reading about him in the journal), Jeremy spends very little time with Lowen, far too little to be falling deeply in love with her. Pretty unrealistic, in my view. However, their scenes together are not terrible. I quite enjoyed their interplay at times. If it ran for another 2 books, I might see it.

However, I didn’t like three aspects of the story. There is a very traumatic event right at the start that is total coincidence. I kept waiting for it to somehow tie together, but of course, it doesn’t. Secondly, there is a plot device used throughout 80% of the novel, and it is incredibly unrealistic, so the big twist at the end isn’t much of a twist. You’ve seen it coming from the beginning. Lastly, there is an extra twist and explanation at the end, all of which brings most of what happened in the book back to a situation of relatively simple misunderstanding. It felt more like a sitcom than a strong novel, where two characters have a miscommunication, never discuss it, and both go off in weird directions, only to lead to tragedy, almost Shakespearean in terms of misconnects for bad plotting.

Disclosure

I received a free copy of this book through an Amazon promotion. I am not personally friends with the author, nor have I ever interacted with them.

The Bottom Line

Too many shaky plot devices, but a good story for the writer’s part