His Secret Child – Cole Baxter

I stand at my father’s funeral, tears rolling down my cheeks. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder, pulling me into a hug. As I look into the face of a woman I’ve never seen before, she whispers something that shatters my world. “He was my father too.”

Staring into the woman’s glassy gray eyes, I pray that she’s lying. I can’t believe that my steady, dependable father could do this to me. But a hush falls over my family as my ‘new sister’ Ava spills secrets about his hidden affairs and how he bought her silence. Now she’s finally free, she wants to be a part of the family.

But as my relatives welcome her with open arms, I’m certain something isn’t right. Details of her childhood keep changing. And I catch the way she looks at my fiancé, batting her long lashes and touching his well-toned arm. Can this woman be trusted? Does anyone else share my fears? Then, with a snide smile, away from the eyes of my family, she tells me that she knows my own dark secret.

I need to stay silent to keep myself safe. Until I find a crumpled white envelope in my father’s office that makes my blood run cold. What if my father’s death was no accident? Is Ava really here to join our family, or tear us apart?

Ava thinks she knows all my secrets, but she has no idea just how far I’d go to protect the people I love…

Review

Absolutely love Cole Baxter; I am now a fan. Literally everything that I have read from this author has entertained me so much, and I’ve finished in, like, a day. I always feel like top-star ratings are the most difficult because there’s nothing else to say other than that I just really liked it!

I loved the scenes that Baxter painted throughout the book—the action sequences that were towards the end, my God. I couldn’t put it down. I loved it.

I’ve read What She Forgot and The Anniversary, but this one read a little bit faster, and it didn’t stall at all at any point.

It was better than watching a movie. I loved Rose, I loved Gregory, I loved Melinda, and I loved Joey. I just loved every character that we spent the most time with, and this is one of those times that I don’t really like written reviews because I can’t quite convey the emotions that I want with just words. I need you to see my facial expressions, to hear what kind of voice I’m talking with for you to actually grasp how much I enjoyed this.

Sometimes I’ll say that my only issue with a book is that it wasn’t longer, so I could have enjoyed it longer, but honestly, I feel like this book was just the right length. I wouldn’t change anything at all from it except, maybe, the cover because I feel like it didn’t really convey the actual synopsis because the “secret child” is a grown woman and not a toddler, so I would just change the cover because I was expecting something like a secret affair baby was going to disrupt this family’s life, but it wasn’t; Ava was an adult.

Some people will say that it was predictable. Baxter shows his cards early on in the book; since the very first appearance of the antagonist, you know what is going to go down. [As you may now] I don’t really measure if I guess a plot twist or not towards my reading experience, nor does it impact my rating, so if predictability is something that you don’t like in a book, you may not enjoy this as much, but I still think that it’s a good read.