Like most people, I've seen all the Colleen Hoover hype online but have steered clear from her books because I didn't think they would be my kind of book. Verity is the only one of her books that I thought I might be into, since it's a mystery-thriller novel (not to say that I don't enjoy romance either), and my book club chose this as our next pick so, here I am.

This book was fine as is, but I left it wanting more, and not in the sense of "omg I need to know what happened!!!" but more like "I feel as if I only know these characters on a surface level." The book itself was quick and very easy to read - I can see why people like her writing style - so I flipped through it quickly. But I found it lacking in description and depth. I wanted the setting and characters to be fleshed out more, and would have liked to hear details about Verity's books and the outlines that Lowen was writing.

Speaking of Lowen - I quickly forgot her name, because she honestly could just be anyone. She didn't read to me like a 30-year-old, and was so generic that I feel as though I didn't really get to know her. Besides that, just every character in this book sucks on some level. Even if you believe in Verity's letter vs the manuscript, she still sucks too. I can't tell if Hoover wanted us to root for the relationship between Lowen and Jeremy, and I hope she didn't because I was practically praying they wouldn't get together. The characters are obsessive on all counts and their relationship, especially as explained in the epilogue, is not healthy and I don't like the idea of Lowen just being stuck like that. There were a lot of sex scenes in this book, more than I expected, and even the ones that were meant to be romantic...I didn't really find romantic. A lot of them kind of disgusted me, actually, and I don't know if all of them were supposed to do that.

This isn't really a thriller, but more of a mystery novel. And I found that a lot of things were spelled out for the reader, which is something I don't particularly like in books but can overlook if I'm interested enough. The "twist" comes at the very end of the novel, literally like 10 pages from the end, so you don't really get to sit with the information and see how it affects the plot, which just makes it almost tacky to me. There's also a few small details that come up (Lowen's sleepwalking, Crew being creepy) that set the unsettling ambience, but are just not expanded upon further.

I found the story interesting enough to keep reading, but it was very lacking. I wanted to know more, and while the potential for a very atmospheric mystery-thriller is there, it didn't hit the mark.