Genre: Thriller | Mystery
Release Date: Expected 6th April
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Pippa and Gabe have the perfect life. The fairy tale marriage, successful careers, two beautiful daughters, a stunning home on a peaceful cliff that overlooks the waves like a majestic castle - but their love story has been marred by death and desperation as the cliffside they call home keeps turning into the final resting place of lost souls taking their own life.
Gabe, her prince in shining armour, has saved seven of those lost souls, talking them away from the ledge and offering them an ear, a shoulder and a hand to guide them back down. Until Amanda. He doesn't save her.
Pippa has no reason to doubt him when he says Amanda jumped, that he couldn't save her. But everything seems wrong - and something about the way he's acting makes her look closer, looking for hidden chapters in their story that she's not sure she wants to read. Because once she does, once she knows what really happened, she has to decide - can she stand by her soulmate no matter what, or is this the end of the story?
"People always talk about love like it's a magical thing, a gift from the gods, a sunbeam of euphoria from above! But it's horrible, being in love."
An electrifying, cinematic thriller set against the beautifully unsuspecting backdrop of peaceful skies, sunny days and crashing waves.
We move between now and then, between scenes of domestic bliss and calm and anxiety and fear; between the confusing current day and those early years of rose-tinted happiness. Pippa acts as our main narrator, leaving us just as in the dark as she is, letting us stew with her thoughts and feelings and slowly forming a relationship with her. We also hear from Amanda, a person we never really get to meet exactly before her untimely demise but get to learn about retrospectively, a refreshingly interesting method of allowing a character to become a central storyteller after their passing. For me, I didn't really like Amanda being used to exposit, it felt vaguely forced at times and as a narrative tool it made me uncomfortable, knowing a key source of information came from someone who wasn't alive in a world that isn't full of ghosts and magic - but it was definitely interesting and gave me chills reading from her perspective.
We only see Gabe through the eyes of others, and at times he really does seem perfect, to the point he made me cringe. But as we get further into the story, you can't be sure anything is true. A shadow of doubt creeps across the entire cast and leaves an air of mistrust. As Pippa investigates, moves from suspicion to doubt, you can see this goes deeper than the surface, forcing us to constantly reframe our ideas about if anyone is to blame, and for what exactly.
This is a suspenseful slow burner, that plants little seeds of concern every so often and makes us anxiously wait for something to grow from the disjointed little clues we get along the way - the pace picks up its intensity towards he end, and although there was a little bit too much telling instead of showing for me, I couldn't have seen the final nail in the coffin coming, it finally being revealed with a surprising amount of heart. Regardless of a few things that didn't quite do it for me, Hepworths stories are always full of mystery and fun to read.
A tense and twisty thriller full of dark secrets being handed down through generations, this will make you ask yourself - what would you do for your soulmate? Would you lie? Steal? Forgive? Kill? Die?
⭐⭐⭐
I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review.
cw: death, suicide, mental illness, cheating, pregnancy.
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