Fiona Lowe has once again delivered a captivating page-turner! 📄👏🤩

In this thrilling tale, we meet the dynamic pair of friends, Freya & Ryan and Hannah & Jamie. Without revealing too much, their lives take an unexpected turn following a car accident at a wedding in a charming country town in WA. As the story unfolds, we witness the profound impact on their friendship. There are themes of relationships, grief, motherhood, secrets, lies, loss, and love, and ultimately self-acceptance for the main protagonist.

Fiona Lowe’s storytelling prowess is on full display in this compelling narrative. Her ability to weave together a tapestry of emotions and themes is truly masterful.

One delightful aspect of this book is the inclusion of Ozzie, a lovable canine character who adds an extra layer of charm and warmth to the story. 🐶 My Billie thought so too 💕

A great read!!

Special thanks to @fionaloweaustralianauthor and @netgalley for providing an advanced reader copy.

I expected more of a thriller/mystery by the cover instead it’s a domestic drama about having babies or not having babies, weddings, relationships, friendships, families and it’s repetitive and full of dialogue nobody would ever say and it goes on for 480 pages! It was fairly obvious that Jamie was a sleazebag and Hannah was just so naive, why did it take her so long to ask any questions? Chick lit is so not my genre.

Another very long read and one which took me a while to get through. As I was reading another book of similar length at the same time I found I didn't know which one I wanted to read more! Close call but it is a tie.

Luckily this book was completely different to the other book I was reading and a book that is intense and emotional, mysterious, scandalous and ever so intriguing. A car accident, two couples and many secrets, this is a book with plenty of twists and turns. This is a book that you really can't put down as you just want to know what is happening, what has been going on and what will happen.

With some great characters that really make this story come alive and many decisions that have to be made this one will get the mind racing for sure. An excellent read and one I highly recommend. Edge of the seat reading. I like that.

Thank you NetGalley and Harlequin Australia, HQ (Fiction, Non Fiction, YA) for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

The Accident gripped me from the first page and I didn't want to put it down. Considering the length of the book I read this one very quickly for me with every spare moment dedicated to it!
The story mainly revolves around best-friend couples Hannah and Jamie and Freya and Ryan in the small town of Garringarup in Western Australia and what transpires after "The Accident". There were plenty of secrets which were slowly divluged, along with twists, some more suprising than others. There was a strong sense of place, and focus on small town relationships. I really felt like I know what it's like living in the Garringarup.
This is the first book I've read by Fiona Lowe, but I'll be reading more of her backlist.

This is the first Fiona Lowe book that I’ve read. I absolutely loved it! I stayed up (nearly) all night so that I could finish the book and only got 1.5 hours of sleep. It was totally worth it! It’s suspenseful, thrilling and exciting. I could not put it down.

The Accident flips between Hannah and Freya. Living in Perth at the time, Hannah noticed Jamie on a dating app and connects with him. When Jamie tells Hannah he’s planning to move himself and his business back home to Garringarup he tells Hannah to come with. They move in together and Hannah becomes Jamie’s bookkeeper. Hannah can’t wait to marry Jamie on his parents farm. What seems like a series of bad luck and slew of unfortunate events take place from ruining the wedding ceremony setup, moving the ceremony to a different area and a suspicious car accident and death of the groom.
In the midst of chaos and grief, Jamie’s family suggest they contact their attorney and find how they can harvest Jamie’s sperm for Hannah to use. They discover there’s a huge amount of red tape to try to get through by filing orders at different courts. When Hannah decides she wants to start her IVF journey she learns there’s even more hoops she needs to jump through including obtaining letters from people who know Jamie and can vouch for him wanting children.
Hannah thinks Jamie’s long time best friend, Ryan and his partner of 10 years, Freya (not to mention her best friend as well) will be an easy two people who can help her achieve this. Freya refuses to and causes a rift between her and Hannah and her and Ryan.
At the same time Freya is trying to stay afloat in her own life. From dealing with Ryan’s grief, keeping her small business afloat and successful, caring for her ill mother, looking after her niece due to her sister’s alcoholism. Once she discovers she’s pregnant she looses it and spirals.
Hannah meets a local, Mac and a new friendship ends up moving into something more. Hannah discovers why Jamie was in the sports car on the old road and a bunch of shady things that completely revolts her and ultimately pushes her out of her grief and into the arms of Mac, who’s so much better for her.

‘Police, Fire or Ambulance? The dispatcher spoke slowly and clearly, knowing the caller on the other end of the line was likely panicked.’

Set near the small Western Australian wheatbelt town of Garringarup, Ms Lowe’s latest novel explores relationships, tragedy and the impact of secrets. Hannah is preparing for her wedding to Jamie, awaiting his arrival at the rehearsal, when she hears first-responder sirens. Jamie is not answering his phone, nor is his best friend Ryan (a first-responder). Hannah is devasted when she learns that Jamie has lost his life in an accident. But once the immediate shock has passed, there are aspects of this accident that do not make sense. Why was Jamie on that particular road in that particular car?

Jamie had secrets. Freya, Ryan’s partner, and Hannah’s best friend knows some of these secrets and is torn between comforting Hannah and telling her the truth. Jamie’s parents have their own expectations, and Hannah is caught between her own grief and a growing need to learn more about Jamie and the secrets he has kept hidden from her.

‘Since Jamie’s death, generalised anger at the world had not only moved in, it had unpacked and redecorated.’

Ms Lowe includes several challenging issues in this story (no spoilers) and both Hannah and Freya (whose friendship is tested) have difficult decisions to make. As is usual in Ms Lowe’s novels, there are several well-developed characters facing difficult choices. Readers may find some of the issues easier to relate to than others.
Another thought-provoking novel from Ms Lowe. There were plenty of twists to hold my attention. Recommended.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin Australia for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Dark and full of unexpected twists.
Fiona Lowe is back with her exceptional writing and story telling! This book had me hooked from the start!
The Accident and its characters went places I was not expecting and I loved every second of it!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I couldn't put it down.
It is the story of two women. Hannah is about to marry Jamie and her friend Freya. They are both dealing with life throwing curve balls and how relationships develop and change.
Another excellent story from Fiona Lowe.

(2.5 stars)
I struggled to like The Accident. It's just not very well-written, particularly if you were approaching it as a bit of Aussie noir and expected the landscape to be practically a character: "The vermilion dawn sky gave way to the quintessential endless outback blue—a day out of the box." It's more a country romance, with a bit of small-town drama.

The Accident is centred around the female members of two heterosexual couples, Hannah and Freya. Both characters are thin and poorly developed: "The cheerleader inside Hannah had squealed and danced. He thought she was gorgeous and intelligent." Is this really how adult women respond to flattery? Is she seven? Neither woman is particularly easy to like. Hannah is self obsessed and starts the book on a one-track path to marry her partner Jamie and have kids.: "Of course she wanted marriage and children, but she'd settle for a declaration of permanence and an opportunity to buy a share in Jamie's house."

In the motherhood stakes, Freya is her polar opposite, happy in her childless partnership with Jamie's bestie, Ryan: "Ryan was just as much a workaholic as she was, both of them committed to giving one hundred and ten per cent to their careers." This is in no small part because Freya's sister Lexie struggles with mental health (and with Freya stigmatising her) and her childcare responsibilities often fall to her healthier sister: "And the one kid that's normal—her childhood's being destroyed by looking after her siblings."

Both couple's lives are derailed by a car accident that sees one of their partners die: "Now the sunshine mocked their trauma." But life goes on, and once the initial tragedy has happened everyone is able to quickly refocus to extract sperm from the dead dude: "A baby. It was such an unexpected U-turn that she couldn't organise her thoughts." Be calm fellas, as the book explains, it's not legal in Western Australia, and "only a handful of women went on to use the sperm" but that doesn't stop the family of the deceased and his widow from trying.

Other things you should know is this book stigmatises people who use drugs, people who enjoy BDSM and swingers: "Things that degraded women. Things that made her skin crawl". I would argue it degrades country folk more, painting them as simplistic and parochial: "Pretty much what every bloke on Farmer Wants a Wife says: love, a best friend, a family." The book masquerades as supporting women's differing choices relating to reproduction, but I think just repeats outdated points of view: "decision not to have children was taken as a personal insult by everyone who had them." To this end, I don't think it's particularly successful even at posing complex moral quandaries women face relating to fertility.

This was my first time reading Fiona Lowe and while it wasn't the type of book I'd normally pick up, I have been trying to broaden my horizons on what I read.
'The Accident' explores the fallout of a car accident and how it affects various members of a small, country community and, pretty soon, secrets start to eke out putting our main characters, Hannah and Freya, at odds and casting doubt over the squeaky clean image of the deceased.
The author does a good job of sowing the seeds of something being not quite right although I didn't quite see just how far it was going to go - on the one hand, I thought it asked for a little too much suspension of disbelief; on the other hand, I thought it was quite a clever take on a fairly archetypal plot twist.
She also does a great job of illustrating the small town mentality where everyone knows everyone's business, and feels qualified to comment, especially around the subject of kids / no kids which was explored quite well.
I liked and empathised with Freya a lot more than I did with Hannah who seemed both incapable, and unwilling, to step back and see the wood from the trees. I couldn't warm to her in the same way; I know we're watching a woman dealing with grief and struggling desperately with it but her decision-making and logic at certain points just didn't ring true, even for someone who was grieving.
One other thing that bugged me, and I don't think this is particularly spoilery - when Freya goes to lay flowers at the crash site and the car is still there, unguarded - this would never happen. The road would be closed following a fatal accident and it would be highly unlikely to reopen while the vehicle was still on the scene.

I was lucky to be on holidays when I started reading Fiona Lowe's new novel as once I got into it I really didn't want to put it down.
'The Accident' is set country Western Australia. Early in the novel there is a tragic accident and we follow the fallout from this particularly for the two main characters Freya and Hannah. Things don't add up and friendships are tested. The themes of motherhood and grief are covered well within the storylines.

I've long been a fan of Fiona Lowe. I still rate 'Homefires' in my top 10 books and recommend to people who want a good book to read. I love her characters and really relate or become invested in them. 'The Accident' delivers the same type of characters I've come to enjoy. Out on March 6th I highly recommend this one along with Fiona's back catalogue. Thanks to Netgalley and Harlequin for an ARC to read and review.

There are so many twists and turns in this book that I had to keep reading to find out what was going to happen next.
One devastating accident can change so many lives.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

Oh my goodness what a book. The main women in the book Hannah and Freya go through so many dilemmas in their lives throughout this book and just when you think they’re going through enough another thing is thrown on them and you find out so much more about them. The writing built the characters of Freya and Hannah so well, as well as all of the other characters. I absolutely loved this book.

I really enjoy getting lost in Fiona’s books. They’re full of engaging and relatable characters and covers tricky topics with care. The Accident explores the role of women and motherhood. Freya is woman who doesn’t want children. She is constantly asked by others when she and her partner are going to have a baby and often told by others how selfish and uncaring she is for her choices. Ironically, she works hard at her business but also cars for her mother who has diabetes and sister who is struggling with addiction.

Hannah, on the other hand, lost fiancé Jamie in a car accident on her wedding day. She fights to obtain his sperm to have his child via IVF. This storyline was quite thought provoking and covered the ethics of this well.

I enjoyed the small town setting. Everyone knowing each other and all the different connections really played well in Freya’s storyline. She got unsolicited advice from many people and in many locations. You could definitely see this happening in real life. All the characters were really well developed and fleshed out. I particularly connected with Freya and really felt for Hannah- she had the mother-in-law from hell and went through an awful lot. The different side characters all had a part to the storyline and were also very engaging.

This one had a bit more of a mystery element than usual. The plot revolving around a car accident. I liked the way Fiona left a lot of bread crumbs along the way. You knew something didn’t quite add up with Hannah and Jamie’s relationship. I developed a few different theories as to what may have been going and liked seeing how it all played out. Another fabulous novel from Fiona, she’s definitely made it to my autobuy list.