The Storm: A Novel

A Storm sure is a brewing down in Alabama! I’ve read The Villa and The Heiress and this one is by far my favorite! I was lucky to be gifted an ARC of this book and once I started the audio I didn’t stop.

This book opens with a young journalist's determination to investigate a death that happened years ago amidst one of the most severe storms ever to strike a small coastal town in Alabama. Where the story takes you it will almost feel like you’re in the eye of the hurricane yourself!

The journalist returns to the alleged scene of the crime to interview locals. One local, unknowingly is drawn into a web of lies, deception, and the buried secrets of a group of friends. In turn she is finding her world changed forever. Just when you thought the truth was shared it’s only the start of how much a Storm can hide!

A slow build up to a raging storm. The ending, though! ⛈️ Rachel Hawkins knows how to write an intense & climatic ending and this one was so good, set against the backdrop of a storm. This one was pretty close in nature to her last book, The Heiress, with lots of secrets unraveling, so if you enjoyed that one you’ll most likely enjoy this one too!!

7.5

“Murder is a chaotic thing. It’s a violation of the natural order, an event that should never happen to any of us, an act none of us should ever commit, and yet every year, the impossible happens over and over and over again. What do we do with that? More often than not, we try to make it make sense. We tell ourselves a story.” But “even though we grew up hearing these stories, they felt far away. Like a village that had slain a dragon decades ago, and sure, maybe the dragon would come back, maybe the dragon had babies that would grow up and come seeking revenge, but the more time passes without the beating of wings in the sky, the more the villagers start to think maybe the dragon was just a myth.” Lo, Ellen, and Frieda were a funny little trio. The wild one, the sweet one, and the odd one, the one who didn’t quite “match.” But they’d “been friends since they’d shared the infant and toddler room at the St. Medard’s Bay First Baptist Church Day Care, and that was a forever kind of love.” And then there were Delphine (July 4, 1965), Audrey (May 5, 1977), Velma (November 20, 1980), Marie (August 5, 1984), and Lizzie (August 3, 2025). “You didn’t grow up in St. Medard’s Bay without knowing about the hurricanes.” Now, more than forty years later, there’s another hurricane, and instead of a governor’s prodigal son, there’s a journalist named August. And instead of Ellen, there’s an inn keeper named Geneva. “But in both cases, there’s Lo, right back at the center of things–the eye of the storm itself. The past feels like a wave, retreating for a while only to rush back in. Which of us will be left standing when it slides back out to sea?” “Hope is the thing that kills…The other thing about hope, though? It isn’t just fatal, it’s contagious. It starts spilling out of me, and suddenly I’m imagining a gorgeous hardcover book with…the one place St. Medard Bay’s storms had never been able to kill.” But “sometimes even places we love can become weights around our necks.” Rachel Hawkins’ The Storm is a Category 5 masterpiece!

Special thanks to @netgalley @stmartinspress @macmillanusa for the advance copy.

Rachel Hawkins delivers another gothic, twisty thriller with The Storm. Set against the backdrop of St. Medard’s Bay, where hurricanes shape both the landscape and the characters’ lives, the novel blends atmosphere, secrets, and relentless suspense. Hawkins makes the storms feel like characters themselves — isolating, destructive, and impossible to ignore.

The shifting timelines and storm markers build a haunting rhythm that is dark and wildly suspenseful. The Storm is a story where secrets can’t stay buried because the hurricanes always bring them back.