OK so this is the book that started all the Colleen Hoover stuff for me. My best friend recommended it a while ago. My sister started it and bought it for her mother-in-law before realizing what an inappropriate book it was to give to your mother-in-law. I waited for a while for it to be available at my library, but then realized that it was on my sister’s Audible account (through my Amazon account!) and finally listened to it (after suffering through some truly heinous other Colleen Hoover books).
This all happens in the first like twenty minutes, but spoilers throughout. We start out this story with our heroine Lowen (whose name I just couldn’t wrap my head around for a while as my name is Lauren – it just sounded not quite right) rushing to a meeting with her publisher. She gruesomely sees a man get run over on the streets of NYC. It’s pretty gross, but interestingly she never thinks about it again after that day. Anyway, she runs into a coffee shop to clean the dead man’s blood off herself and meets a kind stranger. He of course is the person she’s meeting with later that morning. He wants her to ghost write his injured wife’s novels.
There’s some back and forth, and she eventually agrees, but she must go to his mansion in the country and look through his wife’s notes. Of course there’s a semi-creepy kid. Of course there’s a deceased little girl. Of course Lowen starts to fall in love with the husband. Lowen finds an unpublished manuscript of Verity’s that sets all the madness in motion. There are twists, super hard to read / listen to parts, and tons of sex scenes. Overall, I really liked it though. There were a bunch of times where I said, “come on, nobody would do that”, but then again, I’d probably write a pretty boring novel. 4 stars – recommend if you’re not easily triggered! Miraculously (for me) there is no animal torture. There’s plenty of terrible things happening to people though.