This worthy follow-up to Lourey's amazing "Unspeakable Things" is also based on a true crime and takes place in the small Minnesota town of Lilydale. A pregnant journalist follows her fiancé to his hometown to live--and soon wonders where the heck she's moved to, as the mystery of a missing small child is clouded in the oddly intrusive behaviors of the townsfolk, who all seem to belong to a cult-like group. Nothing beats the sinister nature of a small town, and its covens of gossip--indeed, no Big City crime could compare. Some of the images in my mind reminded me of Ira Levin's massively popular "Stepford Wives," but only in broad strokes. This is a suspenseful, chilling, and wonderfully written tale that I HIGHLY recommend. I loved it.

This was a really entertaining, well plotted and fascinating book! And unique--I didn’t know what to expect from page to page. Would it be horror, thriller, Get Out or Stepford Wives or Wicker Man.? And that’s a good thing! I was intrigued when I read that Bloodline is based on a true crime, the disappearance of a young boy, Joan Harken is a journalist living in Minneapolis in the late '60s. When Joan discovers she's pregnant, her fiancé convinces her to move to his hometown of Lilydale, and Joan is particularly vulnerable at the time, having survived an assault and having just lost her mother. Lilydale could be a great place to start a family and the idea of a tight-knit family for her baby is tempting. But everything isn’t as it seems. As Joan settles into her new home, she immediately makes waves as a pregnant, unmarried, independent journalist, living in a town that is a throwback to an earlier time. Lilydale isn’t ready for her.

Quickly things go off track--her neighbors are watching her, she is alienated from her friends, her pregnancy is another foreign thing in her life, and her husband is grow distant. All of those elements sound commonplace for a thriller, but there is a lot here that is unique.

I loved this book and didn’t know what to expect at any point! The ending was amazing and I can’t wait to read her earlier book, Unspeakable Things, also set in Lilydale. High recommend!

Unspeakable Things by this author made my top books of 2020, so this was a highly anticipated read for me, it was a good one!
Bloodline was inspired by the real life disappearance of Jackie Theel on September 5, 1944.
Joan Harken is a journalist, the year is 1968.
She is pregnant, living with her boyfriend Deck Schmidt in Minneapolis, when she is mugged one day.
Terrified and unsettled, she agrees to move to Deck's hometown, the small village of Lilydale.
Joan tries to settle in to the town, but the super friendly residents begin to meddle in her life. She becomes uneasy, but Deck swears she's imagining things.
It is a quaint, ideal little place, maybe just a bit too perfect...
This psychological thriller was so incredibly creepy! I started to dread what would happen next and felt little creepy crawlies along my back as I read.
I loved the time frame it was set in, the late sixties, and all the nostalgia it brought.
What kept it from being a five star read for me was Joan's lack of awareness. I know times were different for women back then, but for such an intelligent woman, I felt she kept turning away from the truth.
I still enthusiastically recommend this chilling and riveting page turner.
Thank you Thomas & Mercer for the e-ARC via NetGalley.

This book had a plot I wanted to love but sadly just didn't. I didn't find it creepy and found the ending to be rather predictable. It was still an okay read but not one I would recommend.
Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I should have known better than to read this one. Don’t get me wrong. The book is good. The atmosphere is oppressive. The tension builds. The local coloring is all reds and blacks and grays. It’s creepy and unsettling. All of that sounds good, but it’s also about a missing child and a newborn. I’m no good with babies in danger. They are my Achilles heel, and Lourey slices right through it with a rusty blade. To make matters worse, Joan.

Joan, Joan, Joan. When Joan meets the man of her dreams, she is due for some good news, so she grabs on with both hands. They move to his hometown with a newborn and everyone accepts her and welcomes them with open arms. It’s too bad that Joan isn’t prepared for Lilydale hospitality. Her forever home is starting to grate, and her neighbors overstep. She feels like she being watched, so she becomes increasingly more paranoid as the story progresses. To top things off, she’s a bit unstable herself. It’s hard to figure out if she’s just an unreliable narrator or is Deck gaslighting her? Because I’ve never seen Rosemary’s Baby, I found the ending satisfying albeit disappointing in a way that has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with life. Still, if you enjoy a good suspense or a good mystery, read Bloodline.

I received an ARC of this title via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

A town with a nimiety of secrets. Everything is perfect at first in Lilydale but Lily starts to notice small things. It is too perfect.
Many thanks to Thomas x2 & Mercer and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Joan and her boyfriend move to the small town of Lilydale, a seemingly perfect place. However, right from the start it was clear that something was terribly wrong with the town. The was an almost cultic vibe. I know it is said that everyone knows everyone in small towns but the level of familiarity and intrusion in Lilydale was skin crawling.

The characters are an interesting mix. The MC, Joan, is complex. She is easy to root for as the outsider in the small, creepy town. She did have her own weirdness though and hence made an unreliable relator which I always enjoy in thrillers. I won’t say much about the other characters so as not to spoil the story but also because they were quite many. I still can’t keep most of them straight in my mind.

This was a disturbing, creepy read that made me appreciate city life. I enjoyed the description of the town and the 1960s time period. I liked seeing how things played out before the internet era, a time when people still had to make calls on the phone booth. The author did a magnificent job with the imagery, the town and time really did come alive through the chapters. The claustrophobic feeling created by the setting and characters made this an even more tense read. In the end, I didn’t love the story like I thought I would but I certainly did enjoy it enough.

Recently mugged Joan decides to leave her city with her boyfriend to move back to his childhood small town, Lilydale. As soon as they arrive, you can tell things are odd here. Something...isn't quite right.

It's a story with a great atmosphere. It's ominous and I found my heart racing as Joan pieced things together, wondered who her friends were and made her secret phone calls. Phew, what a great story that really keeps you on your toes. I honestly wasn't sure how this would all conclude but I do love how it all went down.

And I didn't know about the small truth to the story and the author's connection to the story from so long ago. Interesting inspiration, one that is so sad they've never solved.

Thank you NetGalley for my ARC. This story proves small town secrets may be deadly. This was a slow burn mystery with both predictable and unexpected twists. The pacing was perfect which led to a satisfying conclusion.

So this book was decent. It was definitely a quick read and it was easy enough to understand given the many characters throughout.

I personally liked the storyline even if some people said it's been done before. The ending was a tad predictable but I still enjoyed it. I'm surprised I wasn't annoyed with how obvious the town was because I can't stand when characters don't just LEAVE or do the obvious. But it didn't bother me at all.

I would definitely read something by this author again.

It felt like it too me awhile to get into this book, almost halfway, before things seemed to pick up. Between this story and The Project by Courtney Summers I think it's safe to say that cult thrillers really are not my cup of tea. The twist of the entire story was shaped well and a clueless reader like myself will ultimately be surprised, but inquisitive minds will probably catch on quickly to this creepy tale. I did not really appreciate the use of human deformity to push the conflict along and it became a highlight for the last quarter of the book sadly. A lot of people seemed to have enjoyed this story overall more than me so if you're in the mood for a creepy thriller than Bloodline is the thriller for you! Thank you to Netgalley and Thomas & Mercer for a digital copy of Bloodline in exchange for my honest review.

You know how you're reading a book late at night and it's time to go to bed, and you get to the end of a chapter, but you want to see what happens next so you flip through to see if the next chapter is short so maybe you can fit that one in and then you continue that for several chapters? This is that kind of book.

Interesting from the start, the story just pulls you in more and more. What is happening in this strange little town and what is up with the people in the neighborhood? Very reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby and just as chilling.

Do yourself a favor and check this one out.

There was so much I enjoyed about this book! The author does a great job of dropping hints through out the book that keeps the story interesting. I just knew something untoward was going on in the town of Lilydale but I didn’t know what it was. I think the suspense of it all was what I loved the most. There was some WEIRD shit going on and I had to find out what it was.

You’ll most likely hate all of the characters in this book (love to hate ‘em) and the small town setting in the 1960’s goes a long way to making you feel suffocated in the story and added a lot of the tension in the book. If you like a suspenseful story that will have you racing to the end definitely check Bloodline out!

"Young men like Deck are worried about being drafted for the Vietnam War. After his pregnant fiance, Joan, is mugged, Deck convinces her to move to his hometown of Lilydale where she should feel safer and there's less chance he'll be drafted. Initially, Joan feels welcomed by the families on their street. Even if they hug a little too much and everyone has an opinion about her baby. But when she finds out what they have in mind for her unborn child, she has to find a way to get out of Lilydale...before it's too late."

This book has a big creepy factor. You can smell the rot in the town but you don't see it right away. It's set during the Vietnam War when womens' roles were socially different, but you would hope that Joan would push back a little more. The twist was one I didn't see coming. The explanation seemed a little rushed at the end but it still works.

This was my first book from Lourey and I'll definitely try some more.

Scary! I read before bed every night and I freaked myself out reading this!! Fun, edge-of your-seat kind of thriller, where it’s not so much the tangible things that are horrifying, but the things that are unsaid but understood. Cool twist that I didn’t guess beforehand, and a happy-ish ending. Nice job making the main character a journalist. I thought that was just Lourey’s comfort zone, but in this tale, the heroine’s occupation drove much of the plot. Loved this read (but I need to recuperate with some fluff romances before reading another scary book).

This book is addictive. What a perfectly delivered story. I could not put this one down. Selected for my February bookclub. See review links.

What a super thrilling book this turned out to be.

This is a twisty, riveting story. After a long time, I read a book where I loved the twists and turns. Thillers being my go-to genre I was actually taken aback that a story could surprise me.

The story starts with a dark and creepy chapter that hooks you right in. The author successfully builds an ominous and creepy atmosphere throughout the book.
The ending of this book was so good which had my jaw-dropping. I did not see the twist towards the end coming. This book was inspired by real events so it most definitely made a compelling read for me.

Most definitely recommend this book to all thriller lovers because this, ladies and gentleman, is how you write a thriller.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

From the %50 mark onwards, this book is hard to put down. The motives and actions of the perpetrators are mysterious but end up making sense. I would recommend this to anyone who wants lighter horror. There is minor violence and gore but less of it than you would find in a gritty, realistic crime novel.

This was an absolutely thrilling, blood freezing, jaw dropping read. Thrillers are my favorite genre, so finding a gem like Bloodline is rare and revolutionary for me.

This novel is definitely a 5-star one for me because of the chilling plot as well as its relatable main character. If I can't relate to the protagonist in a thriller, I tend to enjoy the story less because then I can't fully see the events happening to me. But Joan is truly a well-developed, realistic character - a journalist who, shaken my her mother's death and the news of her own pregnancy, moves from Minneapolis to Lillydale- a small town where her man Dex was born and raised. But everyone is overly kind and friendly to the point where things actually seem too weird for Joan...

Overall, this was one of the creepiest books I've read in a long time and it calls for a huge shoutout to the author.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I both loved and hated Bloodline. I love the author's writing style, which was fast paced and engaging. The plot was intriguing. Bloodline has much of the same feeling of dread that was so great in Unspeakable Things.

My problem with Bloodline is the ableism.

SPOILERS:














There are moments of it before the end, but the biggest issue is that ultimately disabled people are used as "proof" that racism is bad. Racism - like ableism, homophobia, transphobia - is bad full stop, and there is no need or justification for attacking another marginalized community to make the point. None of the disabled characters in this book get to tell their own story. None really even gets to speak. None is depicted as a real person. None of what they experienced is discussed - this book is all about how the fact they aren't what their parents wanted is problematic/upsetting/scary for the parents (and for the main character).

The only real comment about the disabled individuals safety comes at the end where a character says they are "adequately cared for," yet they're hidden in a basement. Institutionalizing disabled people, often in unacceptable and inhumane conditions, has been tradition. Not okay, and if you're going to use disabled people this way in this story then I need you to deal with this long, horrific history that's not gone from this country. Frankly this should have been of utmost importance in a situation like this...yet the main character doesn't really even look back after she's safe to worry about all the others who were abused.

Basically, if you're going to use ableism in your book you need to do more than just toss it in so the abled characters have something to fear. We need more disabled representation in books, but we need accurate rep from characters about whom we know more than just that their faces/bodies don't look like what you consider "normal." We need to not have the disabled characters be the "surprise twist," just like finding out a character isn't straight shouldn't be a surprise plot twist.

If you're not sure how to accurately write about disabled characters, definitely do some research and get a sensitivity read to make sure you haven't accidentally messed it up. There are also a number of amazing activists who are active on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - great places to start learning more.