Rachel Reviews: Verity by Colleen Hoover

This book is a good thriller. I've not read Colleen Hoover before and I'm not sure that I'd rush to again but there is no doubt that this is a novel which puts you through the mill, both in terms of the way that the story unfolds which is tense and keeps you guessing, but also in its content, which at times is quite challenging to read.

I'm not going to lie: I've been inside the heads lately of many a disturbed woman with the fiction I've read and I'm not sure that I like it. I recognise that the books are well written but the women depicted in them, I admit I don't like very much and I am glad when the book is finished and I can escape their clutches.

That's how I felt about Verity. The book starts horribly with a tragic accident and while this doesn't set the tone, it also isn't a one-off incident of tragedy in the book.

When Lowen Ashleigh has a publishing meeting and is offered the job of continuing the work of another successful author, she is in two minds as to whether to take it. But she's broke, about to be evicted and having just lost her mother after caring for her full-time, she's pretty much having to rebuild her life and a cash injection and a change of scene would help that as she is required to move in with the writer and her family at their home in the country.

The writer whose work she has been chosen to continue is Verity Crawford. Verity has been paralysed in a car accident and is non-communicative and bedridden. She has to be fed, changed, washed - she is absent. Or appears to be. And yet, her presence is all over this book as Lowen finds, when searching for material to continue Verity's series of novels, a draft of an autobiography written by Verity.

The book then becomes Lowen's experience of living in Verity's house with her husband, Jeremy and her remaining child, Crew as well as carers who come and go, and this narrative is placed alongside the text of Verity's autobiography as Lowen reads it.

Ugh. All you need to know is that from reading the autobiography, Verity is not a very nice person. I was grateful for the raunch, the descriptions of her and Jeremy's very active sex life, just to have something else to visualise which was titillating rather than disturbing.

But it's tense and it leads to a great conclusion which left me scratching my head. However, where I've been in this book is not a place that I would care to go again.

Rachel Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐