"Verity" by Colleen Hoover

The first-person protagonist, Loren, has been looking after her mother (now dead) for months. She's a not very successful novelist who had an affair with her agent who'd been attracted to her because he thought she was like the main character in her first novel. She's offered a lucrative deal to complete a series of novels written by Verity Crawford. Verity's twin daughters died in 2 accidents. She has a remaining son. She had a car accident which looked like a suicide attempt. She's barely conscious now, only reflexes left. She's married to Jeremy. Jeremy invites Loren to stay and do some research. She finds an autobiography describing Verity's first night with Jeremy, her attempts to have a miscarriage when Jeremy seemed to love the unborn twins more than her, and her liking of Jeremy's body.

Loren begins to wonder if the twins' deaths were accidental. Given that Jemery's the model for the male characters in the novel series, she wonders if sleeping with him is part of the necessary research. She begins to think that Verity can move - her son lets slip that she can talk.

In the autobiography, Verity describes how she killed the second twin. Loren sleeps with Jeremy and shows him the manuscript. She hears him confront Verity with it. He tries to kill Verity. Loren suggests how he could do it to make it look like an accident.

7 months later Loren is pregnant with Jeremy's child. Loren finds a letter hidden in what was Verity's room, written by Verity to Jeremy. It says how she'd written an untrue story with true details to help her write a novel, how Jeremy had found it, believed it, and had tried to kill her, how she'd faked her paralysis and had planned to leave with her son as soon as she could get enough money. Loren destroys the letter, wondering whether it's a fake.

I'd assumed that the manuscript was a fiction (written by Verity or maybe Jeremy). The faking of the paralysis seems unlikely.

Other reviews

• Sarah O'Connor (it tries to be a thriller, it tries to be a horror story, it tries to be a creepy mystery but it only slightly hits the mark on all these things ... One of the main themes that gets repeated by Lowen at the beginning of Verity is how an author is not their words, how she is mistaken for being a worse person than she is because of the books she writes and that the voice she writes in isn’t who she is as a person. Hoover did this intentionally so that when we read Verity’s manuscript, reader’s are supposed to think like Lowen that that is who Verity is, especially because what she’s reading is an apparent autobiography. And then of course the letter, which is supposed to turn that on it’s head and bring about the theme of writing vs writer and how we only ever had Verity’s words, we have no idea who she was as a person. I get it. But Hoover just doesn’t do this well.)