if walls could talk

Ellie moved into 1 Delaney Row hoping for a quiet life. She’s been through some difficult years, and she is looking forward to some peace and privacy. Instead, her neighbors keep showing up. They come to her front door to welcome her. They add her to the neighborhood group chat. They bump into her in town and text to make sure she’s okay. Ellie just wants to be left alone.

In a different life, she had been happy and successful as a single woman. She had her own business, offering luxury goods. Ellie had started it as a mail order side hustle and built it into a brick and mortar store also. She had a boyfriend she cared for, Jason. He was one of the founders of a popular chain of salad restaurants, and the two of them shared that determination of business owners trying to grow their businesses.

But it wasn’t perfect. Jason was married. And while he was married, he told her that he was in the process of ending the marriage. Her future had been bright. And then it was all wiped away. And now she is living alone in this house. She has no business, no relationship, no furniture even.

But Ellie does have nosy neighbors. She has someone trying to break in. She has messages left for her while she was out. She has police sniffing around. But most of all, she has secrets. She has deep, dark, potentially deadly secrets. Like her name . . .

Buyer Beware is a mind-twisting thriller, layered with characters who all have secrets of their own. It took me a while to figure out who was who and what was going on in this slow-burn thriller, since no one was who they said they were. Catherine Ryan Howard is masterful in her plotting, offering a trail of crumbs to the truth throughout this story. It was a crazy, phenomenal ride, making me forever a little wary of buying a new house. It’s fantastic.

Egalleys for Buyer Beware were provided by Simon & Schuster through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.