The Ice Cream Girls
Poppy & Serena • Book 1
by Dorothy Koomson
Why You'll Love This
Two women, one buried secret, and the quiet dread of a past that refuses to stay dead.
- Great if you want: psychological suspense built on guilt, memory, and female perspective
- The experience: tense and slow-burning — dread builds steadily across both timelines
- The writing: Koomson alternates dual POVs to reveal how two people remember the same truth differently
- Skip if: you want fast answers — Koomson withholds deliberately and at length
About This Book
Two teenagers. One dead man. A verdict that split them forever. Dorothy Koomson's novel opens on a cold case that never quite closed — not for Poppy Carlisle, who wants the world to finally hear the truth, and not for Serena Gorringe, who has spent years constructing a careful, ordinary life over the wreckage of her past. The tension between what really happened and what the public chose to believe is at the heart of this book, and Koomson makes that tension feel genuinely urgent. The stakes are intimate rather than procedural: a marriage, a family, a sense of self — all of it balanced on a secret that two women have carried alone, separately, for decades.
What sets this apart is Koomson's decision to give both women a voice, alternating between their perspectives in a structure that slowly reframes everything you thought you understood. The prose is direct and emotionally honest without becoming melodramatic, and the dual narrative earns its complexity — each chapter genuinely shifts the moral ground beneath the reader's feet. This is the kind of book where the mystery isn't just what happened, but who these women actually are when they're finally allowed to speak for themselves.