About This Book
Lisa has built a careful, quiet life — a daughter she loves fiercely, a job she's good at, a best friend who keeps her grounded. She's almost ready to want more. But the life she's constructed is a fiction, and when a single newspaper photo threatens to unravel everything, the past she's been outrunning comes crashing back. Cross Her Heart is a thriller about the lengths a mother will go to protect her child — and the impossible cost of keeping secrets from the people closest to you.
Pinborough writes in tight, propulsive chapters that rotate between multiple perspectives, including Lisa's teenage daughter Ava, whose view of events cuts uncomfortably close to the truth. The structure is the engine: each chapter reframes what you thought you understood, and the novel rewards readers who pay attention to what characters don't say. The prose is clean and unfussy, which makes the emotional gut-punches land harder. This is psychological suspense that earns its twists through character work rather than cheap misdirection — the kind of book that's difficult to put down not because of what happens next, but because of who it's happening to.
