Release date: June 29, 2021

Publisher: MIRA

Genre: Mystery/Contemporary Fiction

Synopsis:

Two women. Two families. Two lifetimes’ worth of secrets.

In the wake of her husband’s sudden death, Cassie Costas finds her relationship with her teenage stepdaughter unraveling. After their move to historic Tarpon Springs, Florida, Savannah hates her new town, her school and most of all her stepmom, whom she blames for her father’s death. Cassie has enough to contend with as she searches for answers about the man she shared a life with, including why all their savings have disappeared.

When Savannah’s rebellion culminates in an act that leaves single mother Amber Blair and her sixteen-year-old son homeless, Cassie empathizes with the woman’s predicament and invites the strangers to move in. As their lives intertwine, Cassie realizes that Amber is hiding something. She’s evasive about her past, but the fear in her eyes tells a darker story. Cassie wonders what the woman living under her roof is running from…and what will happen if it finally catches up to her.

Review:

Do you ever go into a book with the wrong expectations and that basically ruins the whole thing for you? I really thought this would be a domestic suspense/thriller and instead it was more women’s fiction with a side of lighter suspense and unfortunately that just didn’t work for me so well here. There were definitely still elements that I liked but overall I was hoping for more.

I do want to say that the narrator, Vanessa Johansson was fantastic and I credit her with me even finishing this one. I’m quicker to set a book aside in print versus audio and that’s especially true for me if the narrator is engaging and this one was. Between that and the fact that I was invested in the mystery aspect I felt compelled to finish and I’m mostly glad I did. This was character driven with two women who were interesting enough but anything related to the mystery of both Cassie’s husbands death and Amber’s past were both easy for me to figure out. I was hoping for more surprises than I got and I guess just overall I wanted more tension and suspense.

Overall rating: 3/5

Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.