Verity

Colleen Hoover's psychological thriller puts struggling author Lowen Ashleigh in the Crawford home to complete a bestselling series, where she discovers a manuscript that may be an incapacitated woman's confession to murdering her own children — while falling for the husband. The unreliable-narrator structure is genuinely gripping and the ambiguous ending lands. Here is the honest truth, though: this book contains graphic and explicit sexual content throughout, graphic depictions of child murder, domestic violence, and attempted abortion. It is not appropriate for faith-friendly or family audiences by any reasonable measure, and we would not recommend it in that context. The score reflects real craft in the thriller construction. But readers should know exactly what they are picking up — this is adults-only, content-heavy fiction.