This is an early contender for my favorite book of 2025. The Ghostwriter is incredibly well written and has everything I could ask for in a thriller. Each character is carefully crafted and beautifully developed through the entire story. I loved the way Julie Clark showed us both modern day along with flashbacks of what lead up to her aunt and uncles tragic death. This is an excellent thriller that really shows the complexities of family dynamics in an almost beautiful way. The twist was really interesting and I never guessed it which is always a great thing to me, as I love to be shocked.

This page-turner throws the reader into a unique plot construction: a woman, whose professional life has been shattered due to speaking out against a powerful, yet ethically questionable colleague, reluctantly returns home to ghostwrite a final book for her father--who just happens to be a bestselling horror writer. And who also happens to have been present during the terrible double murder of his siblings when he was a teenager. Oh, and who might have been the murderer himself, as the world has speculated about for 50 years. You're hooked, right?

We spend the narrative following Olivia as she tries to figure out what really happened all those years ago--because that's what the book her father wants to write is about. But can she trust him? And can he trust himself? The reason he can't write the book himself is because he has been diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, which is destroying his physical and mental health.

All in all, a wonderfully submersive tale that keeps you on your toes trying to find the truth. You might suspect the resolution a bit early, but because the journey is interesting, it won't matter one bit.

This was only my first time reading a book by this author, and I'm still undecided if I really liked it or not.
I certainly enjoyed the setting, the ambiance and the initla mystery. The characters were alright, for my taste. So was the writing.
A little too slow but the conclusion was decent, I'd say.
I might try other books by this author in the future, take a look at her backlist.
Thank you, NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark, for providing me with a free eARC of this novel in exchange for my honest opinion.

Another great by Julie Clark! There is nothing that truly sets the stage like a 17year old who is accused of killing his siblings and in his later years wanting to write a tell all book! Talk about riveting and jaw dropping!

Vincent Taylor a writer himself shooting to the top as a horror writer himself has gone into hiding from illness and calls on his daughter for a favor.

His daughter Olivia the only living child, who is a ghost writer on the verge of a financial crisis gets an offer to write a tell all book about her father’s sordid past!

Whew

Just when you think the crazy has hit you. This book really revs up!

Thank you NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for this Arc. I will continue to be amazed by Julie Clark’s crazy tales!

~Thank you to SOURCEBOOKS landmark publishing for giving me the opportunity to read & review this book.~

First off, I loved the writing style of this book. The author did a wonderful job, and made it easy to visualize the scenes that played out. There was never a dull moment in this book. There were lots of details but nothing overpowering. All the characters were extremely like-able. I also enjoyed how the past & present were both involved so we could see multiple POVs. The plot twist towards the end was quite shocking but I really enjoyed the whole story. 5/5 stars for sure.

This was a very suspenseful book! I enjoyed it very much as it had a fascinating and gripping plot. Twists and turns kept me reading late into the night!

I was excited to see a new book from Julie Clark and Ghostwriter did not disappoint! I loved the setting and multiple POVs. Normally I shy away from unreliable narrators but the medical angle made the story more compelling.

I LOVED this book!! The writing style and fast-moving plot kept me at the edge of my seat. Hired to ghostwrite her infamous father;s memoir leads, Olivia returns home after a long absence to find her father very ill and failing mentally. She sets out to find the truth about who killed her aunt and uncle when her father was in his teens. The killer had never been found and her father has lived under the shadow of suspicion his whole life. The lies and secrecy had driven both her mother and Olivia from the small town, but now she is back and feels the truth will help heal her and father and even her faltering career. Who else could be responsible for the gruesome murders of two teenagers? Some say a drifter, but most feel the answer lies closer to home. Olivia starts to piece together the mystery with clues from her father's confused recollections and a search of the house where the murders occurred leads to a startling piece of information on the journey to find a killer.

Thank you so much to Julie Clark, SOURCEBOOKS Landmark, and NetGalley for this ARC of The Ghostwriter. When I saw this book I immediately added it to my TBR because I loved The Last Flight so much!

If you like a dysfunctional family, this book is for you! This book is so much more than a surface-level thriller. It explores some real family dynamics like the father-daughter relationship. This book is very emotional and thought-provoking. There are so many twists and turns in this book and, surprisingly, these were hard to predict! This book kept me on the edge of my seat and really had me rooting for Olivia to face all that she needs and to uncover the truths that she has been searching for. This book will be a must read of 2025! 5/5 stars!

What a ride! I read this book in one sitting, could not put it down. The story dives into the current issue of a daughter ghostwriting for her estranged father. Then delves into the past which is a murder in her family from 50 years ago. This book kept my attention right from the start.

You are kept guessing who the murder could be as you gain more information little by little. In the current timeline, the dad gives his side of the story, the information he thinks needs to be shared. There are also flashback memories from the deceased that give hints as well.
Excellent mystery that keeps you turning the page and changing your guess of who did it.

What a stellar read! I was hooked from page 1! This is such an engrossing story. There’s many layers that are slowly peeled back. This 50 year old mystery had me at the edge of my seat. I literally turned the pages so quick because I was so captivated and needed to know WHAT HAPPENED. I got more than I bargained for. I didn’t anticipate the turn of events.

I loved following along our main character as she suspects her father and struggles with her own demons. All throughout your left with questions about what happened that fateful night where two teens were murdered. I think toward the end I had my suspicions but the full scope was surprising. I really loved how this played out.

Th Ghostwriter was a strong thriller that delivered exactly what I was looking for from the genre and its description. The story was gripping, and I stayed fully engaged in the world Clark created.

The overall feel of the book matched my expectations perfectly, balancing suspense and depth. Julie Clark’s writing style is impressive, and I’m excited to read more of her work. If you’re looking for a thriller that keeps you hooked, The Ghostwriter is a fantastic choice and I highly recommend adding it to your summer 2025 reading list!

Thank you to Sourcebooks for my free review copy.

📖 ARC REVIEW 📖

Thank you @bookmarked for an early copy of The Ghostwriter by @julieclarkauthor. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. 🤍

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5/5
Release date: June 3rd, 2025

Blurb: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217506549-the-ghostwriter?ref=315

🛑Read on with caution; review may contain spoilers🛑

The Ghostwriter features Olivia Dumont, a ghostwriter on the brink of financial ruin. She has spent most of her adult life hiding the fact that she’s the daughter of famous writer Vincent Taylor, who’s the primary suspect in the murder of his siblings in 1975. Vincent hires Olivia to ghostwrite his memoir, after years of no contact with her. Unable to secure a writing job, Olivia reluctantly agrees and finds herself immersed in his father’s POV of the events prior to his siblings Danny and Poppy’s deaths and is filled with doubts about his retelling that she digs into the past herself for another perspective and discover what really happened then.

Though slow in pacing for the majority of the book, I appreciated how Clark plotted each clue and evidence for Olivia to find which held my attention. As a reader, I was initially led to believe that the present Vincent’s memories were unreliable due to his current condition, which added a lot of doubt that Olivia began digging more into the case. I enjoyed how she analyzed every detail, but not too much so that the reader would lose interest in the story. Though very dark and disturbing, the POVs of Vincent and Poppy from 1975 were also interesting and added a lot of insight to the overall story. The ending, though still very disturbing, was shocking and unexpected. The slow burn was definitely worth it!

This book is another masterpiece of Julie Clark’s and I highly recommend picking this up for a thrilling read. This is my first read of 2025 and it did not disappoint!

I’ll start with the positive that this pulled me right in.

However, the culmination of the story is so fast that it leaves a flat, anti-climactic feel to the rest of the story; so much is left but in ways that didn’t feel realistic. It affected my overall enjoyment of the story.


Other readers may love this but it wasn’t a favorite for me. *I will absolutely read more by the author however.



Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for the DRC

The Ghostwriter
By: Julie Clark

5 📝 📝📝📝📝
Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont is about to get the assignment that will change her life. She has hidden her true identity to those closest to her, because her dad is a famous author with a past that she wants to forget. He was never really there for her.

She signs a contract to be a ghostwriter, because her bills are piling up. She has no idea that the contract is to ghostwrite her father’s last book. Her father Vincent was once accused of murdering his siblings.

All these years later and he wants to truth to come out about that night. One major problem is he is dealing with something that might not make that possible.

This novel grabbed me the first page and I did not put it down until the last page way after my bedtime. Every line had me waiting for what was next!

Clark’s novels are gripping. Her novel The Last Flight is one of my all time favorites. This novel comes out June 3 and I am preordering soon. Thank you Sourcebooks Lanark for this free e-ARC.

I received a free eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I love Julie Clark, so I requested this pretty much immediately. Weirdly, I ended up reading this and A Killing Cold back to back, and they’re remarkably similar - long-buried family secrets, protagonists hiding their past from their partners…I feel like I’m already starting to merge the plots in my brain!

Olivia is a ghostwriter, and a fairly successful one at that. She’s never written anything of her own, but she’s helped lots of writers publish their memoirs. But she ends up canceled when she makes the mistake of speaking out while on a panel with a bunch of other ghostwriters, implying one of the dudes is a misogynist (which…he is!). The furor may have died out, but Olivia decides to double down and write a long Twitter thread, and the guy sues her for defamation. So when a job offer comes in, she pretty much has to take it so she doesn’t lose her house.

The problem with the job - it’s ghostwriting a memoir for her own father. Of course, no one knows Vincent Taylor, the famous horror writer, is her father. Olivia went abroad at a young age, got quickie married (and quickie divorced) in France, and kept that married name professionally when she returned to the states. She’s remarried to a nice guy who knows absolutely nothing about her past. Her father was accused of murdering his own brother and sister when they were all teens. He had a pretty solid alibi, but there were never any other suspects, so the case remains unsolved, and public opinion pretty much convicted him anyway. This memoir is allegedly going to set the story straight once and for all. It’s pretty much the last thing Olivia wants to do, having been estranged from her father since her high school graduation (he shipped her off to boarding school as a freshman). But again - desperate.

Unfortunately, when Olivia arrives at her father’s house, it seems like things won’t be quite so straightforward. Her father is in the early stages of Lewy Body Dementia, and while he’s sometimes perfectly fine and lucid, other times he’s confused and violent (and also somewhat unstuck in time - frequently confusing Olivia with her own mother, who was part of his alibi for the night of the murders, but who Olivia hasn’t seen since she was a small child). He’s written up a bunch of notes on legal pads, but once Olivia gets hold of them, they’re confused and fragmented, so it’s not a matter of just transcribing them and punching them up. And given that her father is frequently not all there, it’s very difficult to get him to clarify anything. He also refuses to let her do any outside research, like talk to the people mentioned in the notes (which is typically part of her process, just to confirm information).

This was super compelling, and I had a hard time putting it down - it reminded me how much I enjoy Julie Clark’s thrillers. Without giving too much away - It becomes clear as the story goes on that Olivia’s father isn’t being entirely truthful, but it’s hard to tell if that’s deliberate or a function of the disease. Is he obfuscating to conceal his role in what happened, or does he genuinely believe things went down the way he claims? Memory is so slippery anyway, and when you can’t trust your own brain it’s even worse. And it doesn’t help that Olivia’s father used to send her on treasure hunts as a kid, so there’s a chance that all of this misdirection IS deliberate on his part, to get her to ask the right questions (that part was a little grating - I felt like there were one too many layers of confusion - is he remembering wrong because of his disease? Is he telling her a lie to cover for himself? Is he telling her a *version* of the truth in the hopes that she’ll tease out the correct answer? It got sort of convoluted). The jumping around in time (we get chapters from Vincent’s perspective, as well as from Poppy, his younger sister who was murdered), but it wasn’t jarring, and thankfully wasn’t covering up a too-thin plot.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. This might be a hot take, but I don’t think anyone is writing fast-paced, twisty thrillers like Julie Clark. All of her books have been 4 or 5 star reads for me, which is rare. I appreciate that the twists are never too outlandish and she takes her time to develop the characters, so they are not just caricatures. At this point, I will read whatever Clark writes.

This was a good story in the aspects of character development and mystery. However, it was so slow, going off on so many unnecessary tangents of unneeded information that did not forward the plot. If this was condensed and given a faster pave it would be an excellent thriller.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that Julie Clark cannot write a bad book (please don’t prove me wrong after this book-Lol 🤣). This is my third read by the author, and I’ve enjoyed each and every one of them. I wouldn’t say this book is super suspenseful or twisty, but it sure held my interest enough that I did not want to put this book down once I started reading it.

Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont, who is struggling financially receives an offer to ghostwrite her father’s last book. Olivia has been estranged from her father for 20 years, and hasn’t been back to her childhood home in nearly 30 years. Her father, Vincent Taylor is a famous horror author ✍️. Not only is Vincent a famous horror author, but he is also accused of killing his two siblings 50 years prior…

Upon reconnecting, Olivia learns that her father’s health and memory is declining. So can Olivia really believe everything that her father is telling her? Olivia decides to go off on her own personal treasure hunt to try and put the pieces of her aunt and uncle’s 50 year old murder mystery together, and to finish her father’s final book.

This book held my attention as we got multiple POV’s from Olivia, Vincent, and Poppy. This book also went back to 1975 when the murders took place, and I feel that it was done perfectly (but what do I know, I was only two years old back then 🤷🏻‍♀️). My only gripe is that this book seemed to go in circles a little bit, or maybe drag on. Regardless, I still highly recommend reading this.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Sourcebooks Landmark, and the author for an ARC of this book which I had the pleasure of reading. All opinions are my own.
Publication date: June 3, 2025 (my birthday 🎉)
Genre~ Women’s Fiction, General Fiction (adult), Mystery & Thrillers

I'm a huge fan of Julie Clark. What I think I like most about her books is her ability to deliver a solid mystery while always writing a very different book. Hers never feel like repeats. When Olivia Dumont is offered a ghostwriting job that will in many ways, save her life, she can't say no--but she learns soon enough its to write the autobiography of her own father, who she's estranged from and who is possibly a murderer. The clues are unveiled one by one in a particularly satisfying way. I would highly recommend!