Sean D

Verity succeeds in many ways. The story is easy to sink into, and diffucult to put down. The suspensful elements are executed well, and left fairly ambiguous until the last two chapters or so. There is an interesting twist at the end for those who care to go that far in. The meat of this story however, are the two romantic relationships, which take up a huge swathe of the book. I would be hard-pressed to classify this as a thriller over a romance novel. If you're diving into this book looking for an unconventional love triangle and gratuitous (somewhat clumsy) sex scenes, this is the book for you! Unfortunately, Verity also fails in many ways. It feels like the author added in a frankly ridiculous amount of sex in order to distract from how little actually happens in this book. The main character Lowen, feels more than a little inconsistent. Jeremy, the principle love interest for the two female protagonists, feels hollow, more of an archetype than a full character. His two main selling points are that he has a lot of love to give, and he's attractive; he exists solely to validate the other characters. Additionally, there are some bits at the end that challenged my suspension of disbelief that I can't get into without spoiling the plot. Verity is direct, we never stray from the central plot for more than a few paragraphs throughout, and perhaps it would have been better if the characters got to simply exist for a chapter here and there, or if one of the many avenues for possible sub-plots had been explored. Overall Verity was not bad. Definitely a page turner (I almost never read a book this quickly). Way too much sex for my taste, but if it's your thing then definitely pick this book up. Overall I enjoyed Verity, but found it to be a bit clumsy in places, and it's probably about 100 pages too short. This is absolutely a good beach or vacation read, but certainly not a classic.