Verity

**Author:** Colleen Hoover

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The dangerous intimacy between two grieving people, the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and the terrifying possibility that the person lying beside you might be a monster or might be the only innocent in the house.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want a thriller that moves like a fever dream, who can stomach cruelty on the page, and who are willing to sit with the queasy uncertainty that some truths are never meant to be known.

Colleen Hoover built her reputation on love stories that hurt before they heal. *Verity* is something else entirely. It is a thriller wearing the skin of a romance, a book that begins with a woman covered in a stranger's blood and ends with a question no reader can answer with certainty. It is the kind of novel that makes you check the locks on your doors and then wonder if the real danger was inside all along. The premise is deceptively simple. Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer drowning in debt and grief after her mother's death. She is offered the chance of a lifetime: finish the remaining books in a bestselling series by Verity Crawford, a novelist who can no longer write after a devastating car accident. The money is life-changing. The catch is that Lowen must live in the Crawford home, sorting through Verity's office for notes and outlines. What she finds instead is a manuscript that was never meant to be read. That manuscript is Verity's autobiography, and it is a confession. Page by page, it reveals a woman who resented her twin daughters from the moment she learned she was pregnant, who tried to end the pregnancy with a wire hanger, who once choked her infant daughter in the middle of the night, and who may have deliberately drowned one of her children in the lake behind the family home. Lowen reads these pages while falling in love with Jeremy Crawford, Verity's husband, a man who has already buried two daughters and now cares for a wife who stares at the ceiling and does not speak. The atmosphere is claustrophobic from the start. The Crawford house is a dark stone manor in rural Vermont, isolated by trees and water and the weight of everything that has happened there. Verity herself is a presence even when she is motionless in her hospital bed upstairs. Lowen cannot escape her. She sleeps in Verity's house, works in Verity's office, reads Verity's words, and eventually falls in love with Verity's husband. The question of whether Verity is truly incapacitated, or whether she is watching, waiting, and planning, hangs over…