Book Review | Veronica Breaks the Bank by Elle Cosimano | (Contains Spoilers)
December 23, 2023
Protected: A Very Merry Christmas | 2023 Edition
December 27, 2023
No One Can Know
My Rating:
The author of What Lies in the Woods returns with a novel about three sisters, two murders, and too many secrets to count.
Emma hasn’t told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn’t spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she’s pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red.
That’s when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents’ house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can’t sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there.
Were murdered.
And that some people say Emma did it.
Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.
Trigger Warnings:
Major: Murder, Death of Parents, Murder of Parents
Minor: Mention of miscarriage, Few paragraphs discussing death of child/stillborn
Characters
- Irene and Randolph – Emma’s parents
- Emma Palmer
- Nathan – Emma’s husband
- Daphne – Emma’s youngest sister
- Juliette (JJ) – Emma’s older sister, the golden child
- Christopher Best = Emma’s lawyer
- Gabriel Mahoney – grandson of Emma’s paint teacher, Lorelai, Emma had a big crush on him. He got accused of being her boyfriend and plotting the murder of her parents with Emma so they could be together
- Chief Ellis – part of the investigating team from when Emma’s parents were murdered
- Chief Hadley – part of the investigating team from when Emma’s parents were murdered
- Logan Ellis – Chief Ellis’s son, drug dealer
My Review
I enjoyed Marshall’s previous book What Lies in the Woods and didn’t realize this book was by her at first. She does have a style – I liked the last book (it was my BOTM for one of the months this year) but I liked this one even better. I think this one had a more twisted plot and played on the relationship between estranged sisters very well.
This book takes place both past and present and jumps between the sister’s point of view. It’s hard to like any of the sisters, but I do find myself rooting for Emma to have a happy ending after everything she has been through and how she has forced herself to not be happy to make up for her past. As the book goes on, I dislike her husband more and more…
I did not want to put this book down once I got going. The book ends with the twists all tied up (sort of), and it’s a satisfying ending.
Would I recommend it? Yes! It’s definitely not a cozy mystery like I’ve been into reading lately. There are some graphic scenes explained but the twists and the building of the suspense throughout the book was great.
Spoilers/Summary
Emma finds out she’s pregnant. When she tells Nathan, he isn’t happy due to timing. He has lost his job and puts an offer in for a new house and doesn’t tell anyone that the job is lost. They have to move into the house where Emma’s parents were shot.
They move in and Emma decides to start trying to figure out what really happened that night.
She remembers finding a flash drive hidden in her mom’s things. When she runs from the house that night, she drops the flash drive and Daphne finds it. Daphne goes to look at it on the computer and it’s pictures of her dad with a gun and lots of number and spreadsheets. Her dad catches her looking at it and calls someone. He is killed that night.
Emma’s dad had at one point paid Logan Ellis a hundred dollars to spend a night unloading cargo between trucks. Gabriels dad had also been fired from Emma’s dad’s company because he was claiming there was some illegal stuff going on with moving cargo. Gabriel’s grandma had thought that the dad had come home at some point because there was money added to her emergency fund, but it ends up that Emma had added it.
Nathan is murdered in the carriage house, shot through the chest. When Emma discovers him, she almost passes out but Daphne catches her (although Emma doesn’t know who she is at the time).
Emma has the baby and Daphne does such a good job with helping raise her. Emma and Gabriel start spending a lot more time together. The book ends in Daphne’s voice – she details that she had woken her mom up that night to let her know that her dad knew she found the drive. Her mom thought she could talk him down so did nothing. Daphne finds the gun that Rick Hadley had given their mother (the one that had belonged to Logan). She shot her dad and killed him. Their mother came down and then ended up killing herself. Daphne also kills Nathan, she says it’s because he was pointing the gun at her and she accidentally shot him trying to get it away from him. Daphne had overheard a conversation with Nathan and his mistress about making sure the assets were in a joint account so that Nathan could get the money
JJ finally remembers the night, she watched her mom shoot herself in front of JJ. JJ had thought she had done it the whole time but finally remembers that her mom killed herself. JJ had tried to jump off into the lake and kill herself, that’s how she got wet.
The girls frame Hadley: Hadley had killed Kenneth Mahoney, slept with Irene and tried to kill them at the river. Daphne frames him for the murder of their parents and Nathan – he can’t defend himself because he is basically brain dead after Daphne hit him over the head at the river trying to save hers sisters. She hides the gun and flash drive in his garage (she had been walking their dog)..
The police believe: Hadley finds out one of the girls has sent he evidence and knows that Randolph won’t do anything about it. Hadley kills Randolph but can’t find the drive, he ends up killing Irene also. Juliette picks up the gun and Daphne sees her and thinks that Juliette killed them. Years later, Nathan finds the drive and calls Ellis. Hadley kills Nathan then goes after JJ and Emma. — the story that is spun to the police gives all of them a way out.