Before we start, I want to mention that I read this book as a part of a new book club my friends and I started. They had a lot of great insights, so I’ll be including some of their observations throughout. The first half of this review will proceed without spoilers. I will mark where the spoilers begin.

Verity is a romance/mystery novel that follows Lowen, an author who is tasked with finishing a beloved book series. The original author, Verity Crawford, was in a car accident that left her unable to finish her work. While Lowen does not initially know the extent of Verity’s injuries, she does know the family has been beset by tragedy, with two of Verity’s three young children now passed. In an effort to find any outlines or work Verity may have completed, Lowen is invited to stay at the family home by Verity’s husband, Jeremy. When she arrives there, she slowly begins to question all she knows about this family.

That’s as far as I think I can go without spoilers. However, I think I can tell you that I found these characters extremely underdeveloped. Lowen is initially hesitant to take on Verity’s book series because she is so “awkward” and doesn’t like to do book signings or press events. As one of my friends pointed out, beyond this one shred of evidence, we do not see her display social awkwardness throughout the rest of the book. She is a quickly able to strike up flirtatious banter with Jeremy. She even takes great interest in connecting with Crew, Verity and Jeremy’s five-year-old son.

We are constantly beaten over the head with how good of a father Jeremy is but the only real evidence we get of that is that he sleeps in Crew’s bed when the boy is scared, drives him to the hospital when he’s injured, and is clearly grieving heavily over the loss of his twin daughters, Chastin and Harper. By the way, beyond some behavior I will explain in the spoiler section, I just gave you 80 percent of Jeremy’s character development right there. That’s about 80 percent of all we know of him as a character, actually. Being that he’s the romantic interest, I just feel we could know more.

By the way, Lowen doesn’t fare much better. Beyond her insistence of awkwardness, we know that she sleepwalked as a child, took care of her ailing mother during the last year of her life despite a rocky relationship, and she is attracted to Jeremy. There, 100 percent. Most of that, all of which we are told and not shown, doesn’t matter to the story anyway. Except for the sleep walking and Jeremy, you could delete everything and it wouldn’t effect the story. One of my friends suggested that I write a poem from Lowen’s point of view, I told her that I felt like I didn’t know enough about Lowen to do that. My other friend just said, “After all that reading…”

By the time Lowen enters Verity’s house (page 42 of 318), she essentially becomes a vessel for Verity’s story, really only to be interrupted by the occasional sex scene.

There’s nothing wrong with needing a vessel to tell the story but why couldn’t it have been Jeremy? I know why and I’ll tell you shortly, but say this book got a massive rewrite and he’s discovering some mysteries about his wife while cleaning out her office. She’s not incapacitated at all, but going about life as normal when Jeremy discovers all these terrible secrets about her. Now he has to decide what to do. Does he decide to escape with Crew and go on the run from Verity? Does he risk confronting her, leading to either one of them getting hurt? Present the struggle, have him take a path and run with it. Ding! Fixed your book.

Come to think of it, the whole romance plot feels like a distraction. Like Hoover didn’t want to bog down her book with too much shock-value horror so she’d throw in some sex. However, this leads to a massive tone problem. And it’s jarring in the worst way. I’m not sure that was the intended effect. It’s hard to get into the darker aspects because you know there’s a separate romance developing in the next chapter that does little to address all that you just read. Lowen might spend a paragraph being scared and then go right back to lusting after Jeremy. If the characters do not deem the darkness important enough to be impactful, why should I?

On the flip side, it’s difficult to get engrossed in the romance and sex because you just read something crazily disturbing in the previous chapter. My “on” switch isn’t that resilient, let me tell you.

Before we get into spoilers, let me give this a rating: 4/10.

One point because I appreciate that Hoover put her work out there. That takes courage and an insane amount of work; I can only guess. The other three points are to address the three writing sins that I think we can learn about by reading this book. 1. Develop your characters. Reward your readers by allowing them to discover new information about the people in this world. Make them feel real. Allow your readers to invest and make sure there is something to get invested in. 2. Make sure that development is consistent. Anything otherwise will make your characters feel hollow and able to change based on story needs rather than realism. 3. If you are going to include a twist, MAKE SURE IT IS EARNED. This is the mystery genre we are talking about. Your readers are essentially detectives. Leave them clues so they can piece this together ála Sherlock Holmes. I get it, you don’t want your conclusion to be predictable. However, if it flies in the face of everything you just wrote, readers will feel cheated, like all the time they invested didn’t matter. I’m confident there is no worse sin.

SPOILERS

Not long after arriving to the house, Lowen discovers a printed manuscript of Verity’s autobiography. The novel is interspersed with chapters of Verity’s book, which Lowen continues to read under the guise of getting to know the author better. Verity is still alive but remains in a vegetative state following the accident. She lives in the house but is mostly confined to her room.

The autobiography reveals Verity to be a woman singularly driven by an obsession with Jeremy. When she finds out she is pregnant with her twin girls, she fears they will steal Jeremy’s affection away from her. We read about her numerous attempts to abort the twins in detail. Even after her attempts have failed and they are born, she still feels no affection for them. She leaves them crying in their cribs while Jeremy is at work during the day and only pretends to be a dutiful mother when he is home.

It is only after she has a dream about one of the twins, Harper, killing Chastin that she begins to feel love for Chastin and increased hatred for Harper. She tries choking Harper as a baby in an effort to stop her dream from coming true. However, she is unsuccessful and things seem to pass by without incident until the twins are about 8 years old.

Chastin has a severe peanut allergy. While at a sleepover with her sister, it seems she was exposed to peanuts and died of anaphylaxis in her sleep. Verity immediately feels Harper is to blame for this and uses her daughter’s lack of emotion as evidence. Jeremy points out that Harper has autism so she can’t be blamed for that. (That is literally why Harper has autism. It is a plot device, gross.) Nevertheless, Verity continues to blame her.

One day, when out on a canoe with Harper (who can’t swim) and then 4-year-old Crew, Verity gets the idea to drown Harper. She tells Crew to hold his breath and tips the canoe. While bringing Crew back to shore, he cries for his sister and Harper drowns, screaming for her mother.

Lowen reads all this and despite being occasionally freaked out and wanting to leave, doesn’t, and continues to pursue Jeremy. Okayyyy. Couple this with the fact that Lowen has increasing suspicions that Verity is more cognizant than she seems. She often catches Verity looking at her or hears her footsteps throughout the house at night. She’s even caught Crew admitting that his mother talks to him.

One night, after Crew is injured and Jeremy takes him to the emergency room, Lowen hooks up an old baby monitor in Verity’s room and watches her. After nearly 2 hours, Lowen catches her moving and frantically tries to warn Jeremy. But then she decides to go upstairs and yell at Verity to get up. Okayyyy x 2.

Jeremy catches Lowen doing this and tells her to leave. Then, and only then, does she tell Jeremy about the manuscript. Apparently, finding out about the murder of his child wasn’t enough.

It’s worth noting here that the manuscript ends shortly after the death of Harper. Jeremy found out that Verity told Crew to hold his breath and he began to suspect her. She said that, if he continued to suspect her, she’d drive into a tree.

Jeremy reads the manuscript, or at least Lowen thinks he does, in a separate room. Jeremy becomes enraged and he and Lowen meet back up in Verity’s room. Jeremy convinces Verity to open her eyes and, upon realizing her deception, he begins to choke her. But Lowen says they have to make it look like an accident. So, Jeremy sticks a finger down her throat. Verity aspirates on her own vomit and dies.

All this would have been fine and dandy. For now, let’s ignore the incredibly improbable way Verity was able to fake being unresponsive for months. She had nurses almost around the clock monitoring her. But by all accounts, an evil woman got what she deserved. She even died the way that she tried to kill Harper as an infant. But no, that is not enough. Cut to seven months later.

Lowen is pregnant. I’m not going to go over the unprotected sex scene that led to this. Just know that the word “seep” is involved. My skin is already crawling. Anyway, Lowen, Jeremy and Crew are packing the last of the family’s things before they are fully settled into their new house. Lowen comes upon a letter that Verity wrote to Jeremy while he and Lowen were “busy” one night.

In it, she explains how the manuscript is just an exercise her editor had suggested as a means of getting into a “villain” headspace. Write about the moments of your life from the prospective of an evil villain. She said the manuscript helped her process all the traumas of their life and that it made this imaginary world darker. Her own world was lighter by comparison. It helped to place the death of her daughter on a villainous person. (Still her, no? But okay.) She loved her family, she swears.

It was at this point that I threw the book at the wall for possibly the fourth time. I’m not buying this absolute character assassination for a second. If you want us to believe that all is not as it seems, maybe include some examples in the letter where things played out differently than how Verity describes them in the manuscript. But Hoover can’t do that because Verity the only acted evil when Jeremy was not around to see it. For all Jeremy knows, that’s the truth. There is nothing to conflict it other than the author’s word. But wait, it gets worse!

We learn that Jeremy found the manuscript on Verity‘s computer shortly after the death of his daughter. He then STAGED THE CAR ACCIDENT HIMSELF. We read about how Verity woke up in the passenger seat of her car with Jeremy driving. There was duct tape over her mouth, hands and feet. And then I guess, Jeremy crashed the car himself?? Unbound her hands and feet and placed her in the driver’s side of the car. This is not explained and is framed party as gaps in Verity’s memory. Jeremy then went home and waited for the news. Excuse me, what? Is he the Hulk?? How was he unscathed? Why did she include this in a letter to Jeremy? I think he’d already know if he did something like that.

Verity is framed as a woman in fear. She is waiting to escape with Crew once the money from the new books hits her account. She fears that Jeremy will be the one to kill her. This feels like that scene from The Office where Michael Scott looks around and says “How the turntables!” This is such a poorly planned twist that comes entirely out of left field. You can’t give us page after page of evil and then turn around and say, “Sike!” All you know about these characters is wrong because the author said so at the end. Even then! I was willing to forgive it. I thought like “Oh, maybe this is a final act of manipulation for Verity! That’s in-line with her character!”

Then my friend pointed out the last line of the book, “The only question that remains is: Which truth was she manipulating?” With a sinking feeling in my stomach, we agreed that Hoover would not have included this line if she did not want this to be taken as a serious twist. It’s a shame, really. What else can you say?