Published By: Michael Joseph
Pages: 400
Released On: 10/09/2026
Welcome to Serenity Falls – the most idyllic, and safest, town in the US – a place to grow up, grow your family and grow old together. For Dan and his daughter, Sadie, it’s the perfect relocation option. A fresh start, thousands of miles from their troubled past in the UK.
But their idyll is shattered when they find a dead body in the swimming pool of their new house – a house Dan’s late mother kept secret from him all his life.
It’s just the start of a series of disturbing discoveries. Abandoned houses where people have seemingly just upped and left. The strange woman Sadie sees around town putting up ‘missing’ posters for a child who drowned almost thirty years ago. An ice cream van that drives around at night making sure residents are asleep…
As plans gear up to celebrate Serenity Falls’ fiftieth anniversary, something is stirring beneath the surface of the blissful façade. Is Serenity Falls really the perfect town or is it founded on something far darker? And is someone so desperate to keep its secrets that they’d resort to anything to preserve them?
Welcome to Serenity Falls.
Once you’re here, you’re here to stay.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Michael Joseph for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I am not a horror person. I don’t like scary films or books. But for some reason, I can always read a CJ Tudor book. She’s got the right level of scary but with deeply explored characters and an exciting story.
This one starts a little simpler, a little quieter. Which sounds odd when it essentially starts with a dead body (no spoilers – it’s in the synopsis) but in relation to some of her other books, a dead body in the pool is the least of your problems.
I need to know how her brain works. I mean, I can come up with story ideas, in fact I’ve got so many I don’t know where to start. But her stories are so wonderfully weird and chaotic and scary and addictive and memorable. I’ve never forgotten a Tudor book I’ve read – which is saying something as my memory is shocking.
It has this creepy, everything’s a bit too perfect, too shiny, too good to be true kind of vibe. Like The American Dream kind of thing. It just feels a bit too slimy.
It’s a slower paced book which you don’t normally get in thrillers, normally they’re really fast paced, and I actually think it works in this case because it adds to that creepy eerie sense that the story needs.
There are quite a lot of characters with a main cast of about half a dozen and several POVs. This had the potential to be confusing and I admit, as someone who is terrible with names, it did take me a wee while to get on top of them. But all the characters were great. Not in character as such, some of them were definitely villains, but in terms of writing style and depth I think they’re great and so endearing.
It flits from POV to POV and it didn’t always specify whose POV it was, but the voices are so distinct that I almost immediately knew who we were with. It’s like we had this main story, and then about three or four other stories, and they all worked so well together.
There’s so much going on in this book – characters, history, backstories, subplots – but they’re all so masterfully woven together and I had no idea where it was going. She’s such an intelligent storyteller.
I’ve always found ice cream vans a bit creepy and I’ve always said there’s nothing creepier than an ice cream van playing music in the middle of the night, and whilst I won’t spoil it here, my concerns were founded.
I read it at the height of the July heatwave but I think this will be a fantastic autumnal read, perfect for that October, spooky, Halloweeny atmosphere.
It was a little long for my taste but that’s not a negative on the book itself, just my personal preference, but there isn’t a wasted moment, everything has its place. I thought it would take me quite a while to read due to the page length but I finished it in less than a day because every time I put it down to do something else, I would be back to it almost immediately, wanting to know what happened next.
Normally with thrillers and (the very few) horror books I read, I normally have an idea of where it’s going. I mean, I almost never get it right, but I have my suspicions. But I had absolutely zero idea with this, it’s so cleverly written.
Is it my favourite of her books? No. That honour still lies with The Gathering, but this is close, it’s still a five star, accomplished piece of writing and I don’t think the comparisons to Stephen King are exaggerated.
Books By Your Bedside 