Verity

Colleen Hoover first put Verity out herself, on 7 December 2018. Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette, reissued the book in 2021 after sales took off.

The narrator is Lowen Ashleigh, a writer with money problems who is offered an unusual commission: finishing a bestselling series for Verity Crawford, its author, who has been left unable to write after an accident. She moves into the Crawford family home to sort through the papers, and finds an unfinished manuscript that tells her unsettling things about Verity's past. The longer Lowen stays in the house, the harder it becomes to tell how much of what she is reading can be trusted.

The book was a change of direction for an author whose earlier work was mostly contemporary romance, and it brings suspense and psychological tension into the same kind of story, with obsession, deception and the unstable line between truth and invention among its concerns. It was shortlisted for a Goodreads Choice Award in 2019, won the Pageturner prize at the 2023 British Book Awards, and took the Lovelybooks Leserpreis for romance in 2020.