I am giving this a generous 2-star rating. I found the characters unlikeable and unbelievable enmeshed in a ridiculous plot. Kelly leaves her fiancé after throwing a temper tantrum over a relationship she suspects he had with a coworker and, oddly, moves in temporarily with a woman with whom she had a tentative friendship in high school. This woman is a noted author of salacious novels and is married to a man with a mysterious career that may be part of a government agency. They live in a highly guarded extravagant home, and immediately make her feel welcome.

As time passes, she cannot ignore their intent to establish a threesome. Even after she finds incrementing polaroids of their badly bruised previous "partner," and suspects that she herself is the target of a drowning, she ignores these fiercely waving red flags. Is she naive, unintelligent or simply needy? With their encouragement, she breaks things off with her fiancé and seems to lose touch with everyone else in her life. Just as she settles happily into her love nest with all worries explained, the ex-girlfriend suddenly appears seemingly from out of the blue. What??

The rest is a test of how often a reader is able to control eye rolls. I'm not sure how this book got into my tbr list, but I do know I will avoid this author in the future. ( )

Except for a few issues I will mention below, this could have easily been a four or five star book. Unfortunately, a number of items totally ruined the book.

The story follows Kelly, who has just broken up/separated from her boyfriend, and moves in with a friend she has known since childhood and her friend’s husband. Things go great at first, but then more and more troubling incidents occur and Kelly is rethinking her decision. Dead bodies appear. Deceptions and lies are commonplace. No one seems to know whom to trust, even to the end of the book.

None of the characters are believable and are all unreliable. That makes the book interesting as the reader does not know whom or what to believe.

The book started out very slow. The first 100 pages were difficult to get through. Then the book picked up for a while, but then slowed down just past the half-way mark. Overall, I would say the book is about 50 to 75 pages too long. There is too much focus on the pandemic and lockdown of 2020. That reference becomes tiresome quickly. Much of the book is repetitive and should have been edited out.

The ending is absolutely inane, insipid, and totally ridiculous. The final 30 pages of the book are awful. The “twist” at the end made no sense. It was stupid and illogical. Too many events happened due to coincidence and were not believable at all.

I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone, but how does a murderer break into an extremely secure house, murder someone, clean up the murder scene, and exit, without three people not hearing or seeing anything? That make no sense at all and is expecting too much of the reader to simply accept it at face value.

As I was reading the book I felt it would probably be a four to five star read, but the ridiculous ending and the final 30 pages ruined the book for me. I cannot in good conscious recommend this book. It was a total waste of my time. ( )

This book immediately pulled me in, but then it got VERY strange.
Kelly and Mike are engaged, but he calls it off after they move to Philadelphia. Kelly is devastated, but she moves out, and moves in with a school friend, Sabrina, and Sabrina's husband, Nathan. Then it gets very weird.
Sabrina is an author, writing steamy stories. Kelly starts imagining herself as the main character in the book. She enters into a relationship with both Sabrina and Nathan. Later, she discovers some information in their home about a former woman in their lives. She begins to suspect foul play.
You will be surprised by the ending, because, really, it comes from out of left field. ( )

I read a description of the book before I started this one, that said it was "a story with lots of sex, but little sense". I have to agree...especially with the "little sense" comment. It starts back right after the pandemic with Kelly Doyle, a woman that was still, 3 years later, still operating with a pandemic-inspired lifestyle that seems to have spiraled into a nightmare. Kelly had moved to Philadelphia to be with her fiancé when his job took him there, and for her, the entire move has been nothing but miserable. She can't find a job. She can't make new friends, and after a big fight, her fiancé now wants to put off their wedding. I thought, "SMART MAN"! When Sabrina Lamont, a school friend that Kelly recently reconnected with on Instagram, invites her to stay in her spare room, Kelly takes off for the Washington D.C. suburbs. Sabrina and her husband, Nathan, live a seemingly glorious life with no money worries or any other type it seems. Sabrina is a bestselling author of erotic thrillers and Nathan is high up at the Department of Defense. They have a beautiful mansion that resembles a perfectly private fortress. As Kelly adjusts to her new life in their guest room, she finds herself moving on and falling in love...with both of her steamy hosts. Just as the two actually open their marriage for her...and I suspect she isn't the first they have done this for...Kelly discovers that their last partner "went missing". I believe you can guess where this is going from here. This could be for Kelly, a sexy new beginning or a really terrible mistake. I usually only get this amount of sex in my M/M romances:) I've read other books by Andrea Bartz so I knew she was well known for her thrillers, and keeping a constant thread of tension going, but was a little surprised by the amount of sex in this one...and not just with Nathan. Seems he and Sabrina were both what used to be known as "swingers". As you can imagine, Kelly ignores every single one of the red flags...and there was a mile of them, in favor of her new and exciting relationship with her hosts. After a while it becomes slightly unbelievable that Kelly was almost willfully waving off the direst of these warnings. Though some plotlines ultimately go nowhere and there are a few too many small twists that will throw you off rather than further pull you in. Readers looking for steamy sex scenes with their mystery & suspense will have lots to look forward to. There was just too much of almost everything crammed into this story. I'm certainly not opposed to the sex, and I really do like a good mystery...but this one just tried so hard to have so much of both that the whole thing lost its appeal for me in both departments. ( )

This book was definitely not my cup of tea. It was so over the top with what you were expected to believe - Kelly leaving her fiance to move in with an acquaintance, Sabrina and Sabrina's husband Nathan, when she had reconnected with Sabrina only a few weeks earlier and then developing a relationship with the couple and falling in love with them almost immediately. I'm not sure why I finished it other than I was curious to see how everything wrapped up. Thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC. ( )