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What it argues
Lowen Ashby is a struggling author hired to ghostwrite the remaining books in bestselling thriller writer Verity Crawford's series, while Verity recovers from a traumatic brain injury. Lowen goes to stay at the Crawford estate and discovers a manuscript Verity allegedly never intended to publish — a memoir that contains disturbing confessions about the deaths of her children and her marriage to her husband Jeremy. The question the novel spends its entire runtime refusing to definitively answer is whether the manuscript is true.
Verity operates on a simple but effective premise: everything Lowen knows about the Crawford family comes through unreliable sources — the hidden manuscript, Jeremy's account, her own attraction to Jeremy that compromises her judgment, and Verity herself, who is either incapacitated or performing incapacitation. The book is essentially a locked-room psychological thriller, with Lowen trapped in a house full of people she cannot trust, reading a document that may or may not be a confession. The romantic subplot between Lowen and Jeremy is both a hook and a liability — it's what keeps Lowen in the house and what makes it impossible for her to be a reliable observer.
What it gets right
- 1.
The embedded manuscript is the pivot on which the entire novel turns — and whether it's authentic or fabricated changes the moral weight of every character.
- 2.
Lowen's attraction to Jeremy is what blinds her and what drives her — the book shows how desire warps the capacity for objective judgment.
- 3.
Verity herself is the most interesting character precisely because she may or may not be conscious and aware, and the novel never settles the question.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Colleen Hoover is an American author who self-published her debut novel Slammed in 2012 and became one of the bestselling fiction writers of the 2020s largely through reader word-of-mouth on BookTok. She has published more than twenty novels across romance, new adult, and contemporary fiction, including It Ends with Us, Ugly Love, and Reminders of Him. Verity was initially self-published in 2018 and acquired by Grand Central Publishing after its viral success. Her work spans emotional romance, domestic thriller, and dark psychological fiction.
