Tag:

Domestic

Review

The Wedding Vow

by Dodie Ownes

Linden and Verity Lockwood appear to have the perfect life—a successful business together, a lovely home, and an active social life. Verity’s closest friend, her cousin Addison, works with her, and she has a small circle of women that she is close to. Though her mother is distant, she hopes to repair that soon. And Linden—well, sometimes he can seem obsessive about things, but that’s just his nature. Everything shifts when Verity is away at a yoga retreat to promote the Verity Rose brand and Linden is brutally murdered. Shattered, she returns to work, but moves out of Windermere, the home they shared, and starts to put her life back together, only to find out, a year after Linden’s death, that he had been having an affair. The police are lost as to a motive and suspects, but Verity wants justice so starts to put the pieces together herself. Then her friend Mimi disappears, stoking even more suspicion. Told in alternating chapters of The Wife and The Other Woman, this domestic thriller is packed with lots of juicy twists and turns, and SO MANY LIES! The slow unraveling of the mystery surrounding despicable Linden’s death will have readers suspecting virtually every one in Verity’s circle.—Dodie Ownes

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Neighbors Are Watching

by Henrietta Thornton

Eastbrook is the Right Kind of Town with the Right Kind of People. The parents are dual-income DC professionals, the kids are off to Georgetown and Princeton, and it’s graduation season, when everything is “just so.” Nobody wants blow-in Finn to keep papering local lampposts with flyers about the nanny who was shot dead in Eastbrook last summer. Ancient history, best forgotten, right? But things start to come further apart at the seams when a local mom, Caren, collapses on the way home from a block party. The next day, she can’t remember where she spent the night and has an injury to the back of her head. That story alternates with that of Tori, who’s new to the town and struggling to adjust. Local teen behaviors make their way in, too, with all combining to give a stealthy look at domestic turmoil and what rich people find important, with their priorities and desperation hit by twists more than once. Thompson’s spot-on language and characterization puts the suburbs under a microscope and will leave readers wanting more.—Henrietta Thornton

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

We Were Never Friends

by Dodie Ownes

A group of sorority sisters gets together to celebrate queen bee Roxy’s son’s engagement to Celeste, the daughter of her Theta Mu sister Beth—or at least that’s what the event appears to be on the surface. But there is something odd about the estate, recently renovated by Roxy’s husband, Ryan, that reminds them all of the tragedy that happened many years ago during spring break, when their sorority sister Sunny was found dead in the pool at the Desert Inn. Nothing about these “sisters” is what it seems, and all have their own stories about the night that Sunny died. Rouda packs a lot of drama into the slow unraveling of the characters—the successful doctor, the Beltway not-really-grieving widow, the scholarship girl, the victim, the drug dealer—until the real crime comes into view. Including a ghost seems like cheating, but the woman in a green gown who looks just like Sunny cannot be an apparition, can she? Mean Girls has nothing on We Were Never Friends.

© 2025 firstCLUE Reviews

Subscribe to our newsletter today!

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Summer House Murder

by Brian Kenney

Yes, it’s ridiculously early. But I’m ready to crown The Summer House Murder the most toxic family novel of 2026. Venom, backstabbing, competitiveness, lies, jealousy, greed, out-and-out hatred all come together to create their own totally riveting little house of horrors. At the center are three sisters—Esme, Piper, and Regina—who are off to Lake George, and their now deceased parent’s cottage, for their annual shared vacation. With three immensely different characters at work, it only takes a few drinks for the women to quickly point out one anothers’ faults, from not cleaning the kitchen to mishandling infidelity to, I kid you not, child abduction. As if that weren’t enough, how about a murder, with a direct connection to the three sisters? I loved this book, but more importantly, so will you. The perfect summer read.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Such a Perfect Family

by Henrietta Thornton

Tavish Advani has found an idyllic new life. He’s newly arrived in New Zealand, having eagerly left Los Angeles to live with the love of his life, Diya Prasad, in her home country. But Tavish can’t leave behind a dogged LA cop’s suspicion that he caused the deaths of several women he was involved with there. When a fire consumes the lavish home he lives in with Diya and her wealthy doctor parents, is he responsible? The savvy local police officer assigned to the case thinks so. Case notes by that officer and the LA cop who still suspects Tavish of murder are sprinkled throughout the story of the young man’s desperate efforts to clear his name and will lead readers to think that the legal picture doesn’t look so good for him. But as the details of Diya’s earlier life with her family and their friends unspools, a toxicity emerges that makes things far less clear cut. A suffocating family is perfectly drawn here, and Tavish’s early life has its own surprises; with the brilliant twists bestselling Singh drops in, it all adds up to a gripping tale.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The French Honeymoon

by Henrietta Thornton

Through the alternating viewpoints of the newlyweds and someone who’s watching them, we follow the unhappy Paris honeymoon of Olivier and Cassie and the time before and after it. Olivier’s time in Paris is a reluctant trip home, given that his tenuous immigration status means that he shouldn’t have left the U.S. But spoiled Cassie, who seems mainly to enjoy the trip as a chance to look glamorous on Instagram, insisted. What Cassie wants, Cassie gets, especially since their marriage is Olivier’s ticket to a life outside France and his gigantic debts there. The person following their every move and Cassie’s every social-media post can see that things aren’t as perfect as Cassie would have her followers believe and delights in the obvious discord. This look at the Paris sojourn alternates with the story of the couple’s short time dating and the aftermath of their immigration-fueled decision to wed, when they live with Cassie’s sister in the family’s former inn. It’s far from the cozy getaway spot and possible moneymaker that Cassie described, adding to the feeling that both parties here have been had. The crime-filled ending of the honeymoon, a twist readers won’t see coming, and life back home deliver on the promise of the increasingly dark relationship and save tantalizing reveals until the very end. Try The Paris Apartment while you wait for this absorbing thriller.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Behind These Four Walls

by Charlotte Del Vecchio

When Isla’s shady side business of digging up dirt for hire leads her back to the all-too-familiar Corrigan Group, she must face the demons this powerful family has held over her for the past 10 years. Isla had a tough start to life, orphaned young and stumbling through her formative years until she met Eden Galloway and finally felt like she had found her family. At 16, Isla and Eden’s plan to run away is interrupted by Eden’s insistence on resolving her mysterious unfinished business with the Corrigan family in Virginia. Promising to return before Isla wakes up the next day, Eden is never seen again. And since Isla is an unhoused 16 year old running from the threat of foster care, she has no option but to keep moving. Isla never forgot about her friend, she just never had a way in—until now. As Isla digs deeper into the Corrigans, she finds unlikely friends and even stronger enemies working their own agendas within the powerful family. Isla must push through the network of lies and family loyalties in order to discover the only truth she really cares about: what happened to Eden? Find yourself as a fly on the wall in the home of this power-hungry, treacherous, and deceitful family as all of their secrets come to light in one final stand-off.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Tutor

by Henrietta Thornton

The tutor is Isabel, a young woman who’s just started her new job at a rich Florida private school. Readers know that she’s angling to meet the Caldwells, a family whose son, James, attends the school; we follow along as she visits their palatial home for the first time, snooping while there—but what’s she up to? In the meantime, we meet Evelyn, James’s mean-spirited grandmother. Her daughter-in-law Rose, the female lead here, can’t do anything right, and in Evelyn’s view is a gold digger who needs to be out of the picture. The man between these two women is too busy with his finance work to be of any help, and the situation disintegrates as Isabel reveals the reason she wants to know the Caldwells and Rose finds out that her mother-in-law is rumored to have too many mysterious deaths in her tony circle. With secrets and twists coming fast, not to mention emotional stakes that build to fever pitch, this is psychological fiction at its best.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Dead Husband Cookbook

by Dodie Ownes

Maria and Damien Capello hit the big time when they opened their oh-so-chic restaurant Polpette della Nonna in upstate New York. Chef Damien was the darling of the foodie circuit, known for his incredible creations—until his sudden disappearance, officially ruled as a suicide. But since no body was ever found, suspicion abounds, and rumors swirl that Maria had something to do with it. Which might involve a freezer, a cookbook, and a secret ingredient. When publisher Hanes House gets one scant chapter from Maria, promising to tell the real story, junior editor Thea is shocked when she is assigned to the project and whisked off to meet Maria to flesh out the rest of the book, on an extremely tight deadline. Thea’s phone is taken away, wifi access is highly controlled, and as she is doled out one chapter at a time by the enigmatic Maria, with the mystery of the vanishing chef slowly revealed in one delicious twist after another. Nothing is as it appears in the Capello family, and their secrets will soon collide with Thea’s world. With its humor, touch of domestic angst, and possibly unreliable narrators and recipes, foodies who love a good mystery in a kitchen setting will devour this tale.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Vanishing Place

by Henrietta Thornton

There’s no horror here but plenty of scares as nine-year-old Effie must parent her siblings in her family’s freezing shack in the western New Zealand bush. With the nearest town, Koraha, six hours walk through dense forest, Mum with a new baby and Dad mostly off hunting and fishing, it’s all Effie can do to keep the little ones fed and warm. The new baby, the fourth child and named four, heralds a much harder chapter for the family, one that ultimately sees Effie living as an adult in Scotland. She’s compelled to return to New Zealand when reports reach her that a little girl—unknown to Effie but looking exactly like her—has shown up in the town, injured and starving. Who she is and what happened in the past is a twist-filled saga that drops readers right into the dangerous landscapes that are both the New Zealand wilderness (“an unforgiving thing that would eat them up”) and the off-off grid family. One to remember, and a must for fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible and Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail