Blog tour - The Secrets You Keep by Kate White

Amazon (UK): 

You’ve lost your memory. A woman has been murdered. Your husband is keeping secrets. How do you know who to trust?

Months after a being involved in a terrible car crash, Bryn Harper is physically healed but her emotional scars remain raw. She has no memory of the accident and is plagued with bad dreams.

When Bryn and her husband, Guy, host a dinner party Bryn swears money has been stolen while Guy seems unfazed. Bryn confronts the caterer that night and is horrified to discover the woman’s brutally slain body the next day.

As the case is investigated, Bryn is dragged into a fresh nightmare and learns that Guy is keeping things from her. Another murder occurs and Bryn realises the danger is getting ever closer to home. How well does Bryn really know the man she loves?

For fans of psychological suspense and compulsive mysteries, don’t miss this tense and page-turning novel. Before I Go to Sleep meets The Husband’s Secret.

Author, Bryn Harper, has relocated from New York to Saratoga Springs where her husband is working for the summer. She is recovering from a car accident in which her companion died, and has no memory of what happened or why she was really in the car with him. She's fragile and vulnerable, she is unable to write and finding herself plagued by a crippling fatigue.

Bryn finds the body of a woman with whom she had had an altercation, who had been brutally murdered and the circumstances are looking strange to outsiders. It sparks a chain of events that leave Bryn wondering who around her she can really trust, all the time being haunted by recurring dreams of what happened before the fatal crash. She feels she's so close to finding answers that are a fingertip away. She wonders if this is what someone is scared of as it's soon plain that someone is out to get her.

I adored this fast paced thriller. I found myself racing to turn the pages, and the usual 'just one more chapter' mantra kicked in.
I loved White's style of writing, the characters and the settings. She has a real knack for keeping the reader guessing, and I had various theories of what I thought was happening - I was wrong on all counts.
The ending was perfect - it was all tied up nicely. Especially when Bryn finally got to the bottom of the crash, her demons were finally slayed.
I can't say too much more without giving anything away - but I would urge anyone who likes this genre to give it a try. It had me hooked from the start.

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About the author...

Kate White is the New York Times bestselling author of twelve works of fiction: seven Bailey Weggins mysteries and five stand-alone psychological thrillers, including most recently, The Secrets You Keep. For fourteen years she was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and though she loved the job (and the Cosmo beauty closet!), she decided to leave in late 2013 to concentrate on being a full-time author and speaker.

Website: Kate White 
Twitter: @katemwhite

Review: The Little Bakery on Rosemary Lane by Ellen Berry

Buy here from Amazon.co.uk

Prepare to fall in love with beautiful village of Burley Bridge.

Growing up in a quiet Yorkshire village, Roxanne couldn’t wait to escape and find her place in the world in London. As a high-powered fashion editor she lives a glamorous life of perennial singlehood – or so it seems to her sister Della. But when Roxanne gets her heart broken by a fashion photographer, she runs away, back to Della’s welcoming home above her bookshop in Burley Bridge.

But Burley Bridge, Roxanne discovers, is even quieter than she remembered. There’s nothing to do, so Roxanne agrees to walk Della’s dog Stanley. It’s on these walks that Roxanne makes a startling discovery: the people who live in Burley Bridge are, well, just people – different from the fashion set she’s used to, but kind and even interesting. Michael, a widower trying to make a go of a small bakery, particularly so. Little by little, cupcake by cupcake, Roxanne and Michael fall into a comforting friendship.

Could there be a life for Roxanne after all, in the place she’s spent 46 years trying to escape?

Roxanne Cartwright, fashion editor for a glossy London magazine appears to have a perfect life. If you fancy single(ish), child free and living in central London mixing with glamorous models and styling dazzling fashion shoots (you may guess this was once my dream...) but changes being implemented within the magazine by a know-nothing editor start to crumble Roxanne's perfect job and make her seek refuge with older sister, Della, who runs a cook book shop in her home town of Burley Bridge in rural Yorkshire. Somewhere that Roxanne had been trying to run from all her adult life.

We first met Roxanne, but mainly Della, in Berry's first book (one of my favourites, Fiona Gibson writes under Ellen Berry for these Burley Bridge novels). We didn't get to know too much about Roxanne but she did come across a bit selfish and caught up in her glamorous London life to help Della when their mother died. I must admit I wasn't keen on her character when we met her in The Little Bookshop on Rosemary Lane, but getting to know her properly I really did like her in this book.

So with her sabbatical in the country well underway she begins slowly to reacquaint herself with the village and the natives, and begins to realise they're not all Cath Kidston wellies and pots of homemade jam (although IMHO nothing is wrong with either of these), and friendships begin to blossom.

Her relationship slightly cool - on/off boyfriend Sean (a bit of a creep) plays on her mind a lot while in Burley, she knows something is amiss but still tries her hardest to make it work, so keeps the lovely Michael from the quaint and gorgeous sounding bakery at arms length when it's clear they both like each other, and the friendship that is sparked between Roxanne and Michael's teenage daughter, Ella is charming and probably my favourite aspect of the book.

The book itself is beautiful, the writing superb and the descriptions charming, how I'd love to live in Burley Bridge, I quite fancy opening up my own boutique there, or perhaps a chocolate shop? Anyway, I did love the book but it fell slightly away from getting 5* as I would have liked it to have been a little bit more about the bakery - which really did play quite a small part? I seemed to be waiting throughout a lot of the story, then realised by 90% it wasn't coming. But don't let this put you off unless you want a blow-by-blow account of how many cream horns Michael sells throughout the week, because it really is a lovely, charming, witty and well written book. I'd love to see, and am sure there will be, another Burley Bridge outing to come.

Review copy provided via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

Review - The Man I Thought You Were by Leah Mercer

Buy here from Amazon.co.uk

One fine autumn evening, Anna returns from work and starts making dinner, eager to welcome home her husband, Mark. It’s just like any other day in their ten-year, Pinterest-perfect marriage—until he says he’s leaving her.

Discovering that the man she thought she knew better than anyone else is capable of abandoning it all sends Anna reeling. She believed the life they’d built together—and the bright future they’d imagined—counted for everything. How can he walk away?

The truth is Mark is battling secrets of his own—secrets Anna knows nothing about. A painful past and an uncertain future threaten to bring his life down around him—and he’ll do anything not to expose her to that.

But unravelling the past is lonelier than Mark could ever have imagined and, as the days turn to months, Anna worries the separation will break them forever. Can she bring him back from the brink of self-destruction before it’s too late, or will she discover that she never really knew him at all?

Mark comes home and drops the biggest bombshell of Anna's life upon her - he's leaving. He doesn't want any more contact with her and their 10 year marriage is over. Poor Anna had just caramelised her onions to perfection, as well.

It took Anna a few days and many stages of grief to accept what was going on, that Mark really had upped and left. I was annoyed with Mark at this point, they had a perfect marriage, a beautiful home and he'd abandoned them - I thought for another woman or a life of crime. How wrong I was!

It turns out, well, I'm not going to say because 'spoiler alert!', but he's doing it to save her. To prevent her having to go through the most painful time in his past. He hopes that she'll just forget about him and move on, hoping that hating him would make it easier for her.

He just wanted to do one last thing for her, to find someone important from his past, someone who he feels he abandoned himself.

This book was really sad. Well written and thought out, but sad. It didn't depress me though like The Fault in our Stars or Me Before You kind of sad, the ending was rewarding in it's own way, and it doesn't leave you feeling totally bereft, but it's not light reading. It is though, rewarding reading. I loved the way that the parts of Mark's past came together in the end.

I was frustrated in parts, but all credit to Mercer, that's the testimony of a good writer when people are shouting at your characters, it shows you've developed that relationship with them.

It's definitely a curl-up-on-the-sofa-with-a-hot-chocolate, autumnal kind of read.

I received an advance copy in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley