Verity absolutely nails the “cannot put it down” factor. The premise is wickedly bingeable, the tension is engineered to keep you flipping pages, and I flew through it because I needed to know where it was going. It is a popcorn thriller in the best way, and I genuinely wanted to love it.
That said, I had multiple moments where the book made me cringe hard, mostly around how quickly Lowen latches onto Verity’s life and, especially, Verity’s husband. Early on, Lowen is framed as someone who is trying to survive, keep her head down, and live like a normal person. She even describes herself as someone who disappears into the background, saying she has worked at “attempting to become as hardened and as invisible as ever” and that she “moved to this city to be invisible.”
That grounding felt believable to me. But then she devolves fast. For someone who supposedly does not want the spotlight or the lifestyle of a “renowned author,” she attaches herself to the Crawford orbit with shocking speed, and her moral boundaries start sliding almost immediately. The instalust with Jeremy felt cliché, and it made the whole dynamic feel less like a slow-burn psychological trap and more like a convenient thriller shortcut.
And then there is the sexual decision-making. There is a specific scene later where the contraception conversation made me roll my eyes because it felt like it was telegraphing a future plot point. Even setting that aside, Lowen had zero business sleeping with a “disabled” woman’s husband, and certainly not in a way that risked creating a baby with him after knowing him for, what, a couple of weeks. It is not romantic to me, it is just… gross. It also made the story feel unrealistic, because the book wants me to believe Lowen has standards and a conscience, but her actions do not match that for long.
As for the ending: I choose to believe Verity’s letter. And if you read it the same way I did, Jeremy becomes the most unsettling character in the entire book. A man who is willing to capitalize on his wife’s career, curate the narrative around her condition, and move on sexually that easily (and recklessly) reads as deeply untrustworthy. With that lens, his capacity for harm does not feel like a twist, it feels like the logical conclusion.
Overall: the concept is A+, the pacing is addictive, and the reading experience is ridiculously entertaining. But the interpersonal choices (especially Lowen’s) felt too fast, too convenient, and too morally unconvincing for me to fully buy into the “realism” of the situation. I am glad I read it, I see why people devour it, and I will absolutely give it credit for being a page-turner. I just could not get past how quickly it asked me to accept behavior that felt more like thriller trope mechanics than believable human decision-making.