Verity by Colleen Hoover

“It’s what you do when you’ve experienced the worst of the worst. You seek out people like you… people worse off than you… and you use them to make yourself feel better about the terrible things that have happened to you.”

When a fairly obscure author, Lowen, with a depleting bank account, is offered to write the final installments in a successful book series by an invalid author, Verity, in exchange for a handsome sum of money by Verity's husband, Jeremy, Lowen is in no position to refuse.

So, she steps into Verity's office to gather up the pieces of her tangled life and Verity's unfinished series, and in the process, stumbles onto Verity's "autobiography," which reveals her darkest, most horrific confessions.

With undertones of an illicit affair blossoming between Jeremy and Lowen while a paralyzed Verity's presence is palpable, what follows is a wonderfully wrought psychological thriller that had me up at 5 a.m., unblinking, and my mind completely blown away.

It's been a minute since I read a book that I couldn't put down. One, because it's so compelling that the curiosity was insatiable. And two, not reading it made me feel more anxious than reading it, which is saying something considering the book is one twisted and terrifying trip.

I'm acquainted with Colleen Hoover's dramatic thriller and plot twists. She's always been brilliant at depicting relationships, both romantic and familial. But this Gillian Fynn-style horror show with the unreliable narrator(s) had me literally checking “the monster under the bed”.

Highly recommended. But do check the trigger warnings (graphic and extensive) beforehand. because as Verity herself describes it:

“What you read will taste so bad at times, you’ll want to spit it out, but you’ll swallow these words and they will become part of you, part of your gut, and you will hurt because of them. Yet. You’re going to continue to ingest my words, because here you are. 
Human. 
Curious. 
Carry on”