Book Review: The Retirement You Didn't See Coming

Title: The Retirement You Didn't See Coming

Author: Dan Haylett

Publisher: Bookvault Publishing

Publication Date: July 1, 2025

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I rarely review books other than ARCs, but when a book could be life-changing, I have to say so. This is one of those. Dan Haylett, a financial planner and retirement specialist, has written this for people approaching retirement or in its early years.

Don't expect investment strategies or withdrawal rates. This is about the emotional side of retirement, which is far more valuable. It's packed with author-drawn figures, deep questions to ponder, real human stories, and tools for crafting the second chapter you actually want.

After ten chapters dismantling ten illusions about retirement, Haylett offers two key sections. The first is the Retirement Reinvention Curve. Instead of climbing a straight line into retirement, he says, we move through three distinct phases: release, rebuild, and reignite. His descriptions helped me see exactly where I am. 

The second section lays out five pillars for a thriving retirement, which show how to rebuild and reignite. From page 162:

They won't guarantee a perfect retirement -- nothing can -- but they'll give you something solid to build on. Something human. Something resilient. Something real.

1. Purpose -- What gives your day meaning?
2. Identity -- Who are you now that you're not your job?
3. Relationships -- Who are you doing life with?
4. Structure -- What does a good Tuesday look like?
5. Well-being -- Do you have the energy to enjoy freedom?

These pillars work together to support each other. They evolve with you, and they can be revisited any time the ground shifts. Retirement isn't just about finding the right answer. It's about building the right environment for your next you to emerge.

As a recent retiree, I found myself drawn to the questions. One for the identity pillar asks: How would you describe yourself now, in one sentence? My answer: I am a lifelong learner seeking to thrive physically, recreationally, intellectually, socially and mentally, making time and space for relationships.

Near the end, Haylett turns to spending time and money in retirement, using the "Go-Go, Slow-Go, No-Go" framework. His point is that we have a limited window of good health to enjoy retirement before we slow down and eventually can't go at all. Over a 30-year retirement, that might mean three roughly successive decades. Do the long-awaited dreams early, before the later years make them harder.

I borrowed this book from the library and read it in 2 days. Now I'm buying a copy so I can go through it slowly and work through all the questions and exercises. After that, I'll pass it on to a friend or relative who needs it more than I do. It will help me design the next phase of my life.

Book Review: One of Us is Guilty

Title: One of us is Guilty

Author: Steve Cavanagh

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: March 23, 2027

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

If I were facing a murder charge, Eddie Flynn is the defense lawyer I'd want in my corner. He might not look the part and he might not prepare like the other lawyers, but he knows how to put on a defense, and how and when to pull a con, even on the judge or the DA. He's a con man first and a lawyer second. 

In this new Flynn thriller, Vanessa Vanderpool waits outside her husband's secret apartment and watches him walk in to meet his mistress. Inside, Patrick Vanderpool, the son of a wealthy businessman and a reluctant political candidate, finds a diary in his lover's apartment that threatens everything. Both husband and wife have motive and opportunity. One of them is a killer, but which one? I didn't know. It could have been Vanessa, acting out of jealousy. It could have been Patrick, after finding out who his lover really was. Even at the 95% mark I couldn't say who was guilty, only that someone was. And the final reveal is a huge twist I never saw coming. It also leaves Eddie's conscience no worse off, which is no small thing for this series.

All the main characters are back. Eddie Flynn, the former con man turned defense attorney, working out of his office above the tattoo parlour. Harry Ford is the retired judge and heavy drinker with the mutt dog. Bloch is the investigator who knows her stuff but barely knows how to hold a conversation. Lake is the ex-FBI man who is a killer of serial killers.

Eddie is to lawyers what Reacher is to investigators. Both live by their own moral code and won't let rules or laws stand between them and the right thing. That righteousness is also their Achilles heel. And of course, like Reacher there's the moment when his death looks imminent and inescapable, and Flynn uses a little muscle but mostly his quick thinking and sharp tongue to save him.

The book also reminds us why Eddie fights the way he does: "I would only take cases where I believed my client was innocent, and I would fight for them with everything I had." And as he knows too well, "An innocent person has a better chance of cleaning out the casino at a roulette table than getting a fair trial."

This is the 10th book in the series and it might be the best Eddie Flynn book yet. Most of the books work as stand-alone stories, so you can jump in here. It does help to know the backstory of the previous nine, though. 

A big thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#NetGalley #Atria

Book Review: The Tribes

Title: The Tribes

Author: Mari Howes

Publisher: Dutton

Publication Date: November 3, 2026

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I went into this debut expecting a gripping legal thriller, and I came away with something much darker and heavier. When a panicked woman phones 9-1-1 from a gas station payphone in rural Vermont to report a dead newborn, police charge Heather Garner, a college drop-out and member of the fringe religious community The Messiah's Tribes, with murdering her son. Her family hasn't heard from her in almost twenty years. Lawyer Abby Harris, pregnant with her first child, takes the case over the puzzlement of her friends and colleagues, convinced there's more to the story. As she digs, she begins to suspect the Tribes are less a harmless band of eccentric hippies than a well-organized, exploitative criminal enterprise.

The book alternates between Abby's legal defense investigation and chapters that reveal Heather's past inside the community. It's a sound structure, but the balance is off. The cult chapters take up most of the space, and I found them slow, depressing, and disturbing, and hard to get through. The book opens strongly, but the momentum bogs down quickly. If I hadn't planned to review it, I would have DNF'd before the 20% mark.

Where Howes deserves credit is characterization. Heather in particular is drawn with real depth, and you can feel how thoroughly she has been shaped by her indoctrination. That realism worked against my enjoyment, though. Heather is so deeply brainwashed and so unwilling to step out of the cult that I struggled to root for her, and without a character to cheer for, the slow stretches felt even longer. The ending didn't help. It doesn't land anywhere satisfying, and too many threads are left loose. If you're hoping for a feel-good resolution or a tidy legal payoff, this isn't it.

Overall, this is a well-observed but bleak read that didn't deliver the legal thriller I was hoping for, and I don't recommend it.

A big thank you to Dutton and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#NetGalley #Dutton

Book Review: The Sleeper

Title: The Sleeper

Author: Holly Seddon

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: November 17, 2026

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I love a book that makes you sit with an uncomfortable "what if," and Holly Seddon's alternate-reality thriller does exactly that. Librarian Maya boards her usual sleeper train from Edinburgh to London, but when lightning strikes the carriage she wakes into a London she doesn't recognize — one where the Berlin Wall never fell, the Cold War never ended, and Britain is an authoritarian Soviet state. Her husband Arthur is missing, a stranger is living in her flat, and because her parents never had their gap-year kiss by the wall, Maya herself was never born into this version of the world. Alone and adrift, she falls in with a resistance movement built largely around librarians like her, and gets sent undercover into the government itself, desperate to find her way home and the people she loves along the way.

It's part Cold War spy thriller, part time-travel science fiction, and the blend mostly works, even if the pacing sags somewhat. What I loved most was the doubling of Arthur — one version in Maya's real timeline, one in this Soviet-London reality — set against a single Maya who has to become someone else entirely just to survive.
That contrast does a lot of quiet work, and it's where the book's emotional core really lives. The lightning-strike-as-portal device asks for a fair bit of suspension of disbelief, but I was willing to grant it for the story it unlocks. I did find myself occasionally frustrated by how long Maya goes without picking up the language or customs of the world she's landed in — it stretched credulity a bit for someone this resourceful.

Where the book shines is in its small, telling details of a world with less — parents actually holding their children's hands and talking to them instead of staring at phones, kids clutching dolls and rattles instead of screens, a boy playing spy with real gusto because that's the entertainment he's got. It's a clever way of making the reader question what our own abundance and freedom have cost us. And I loved that libraries end up as the story's literal safe haven — as someone who thinks of libraries as sanctuaries myself, that felt exactly right.

A big thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#NetGalley #AtriaBooks