The Storm

Author: Rachel Hawkins Title: The Storm Publisher: St. Martin's Press Date Published: 01/06/2026

Read Dates: 11/30/2025- 12/01/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 📖 I received a gifted e-book ARC. The following is my honest review✍🏻

The Storm is a multi POV, multi timeline thriller. The bulk of it is told from the POV of Geneva, a woman running her family’s beachside inn that was left to her after her mother entered a care facility for dementia. When an author working on a book about a local woman accused of murdering her married older lover 40 years ago books rooms at the inn for the majority of the summer, Geneva sees only the potential to get out of debt. She isn’t expecting that the history August and Lo will be dredging up will be as destructive as any storm!

This was a good one, but I think it will be better in print. It reminded me of The Villa, the way it interspersed the present day with chapters from a book, the occasional article, and memories from women that took place during storms that hit between the mid 60s and mid 80s.

St. Medard’s Bay, Alabama is famous for three things: the deadly hurricanes that regularly sweep into town, the Rosalie Inn, a century-old hotel that’s survived every one of those storms, and Lo Bailey, the local girl infamously accused of the murder of her lover, political scion Landon Fitzroy, during Hurricane Marie in 1984.

When Geneva Corliss, the current owner of the Rosalie Inn, hears a writer is coming to town to research the crime that put St. Medard’s Bay on the map, she’s less interested in solving a whodunnit than in how a successful true crime book might help the struggling inn’s bottom line. But to her surprise, August Fletcher doesn’t come to St. Medard’s Bay alone. With him is none other than Lo Bailey herself. Lo says she’s returned to her hometown to clear her name once and for all, but the closer Geneva gets to both Lo and August, the more she wonders if Lo is actually back to settle old scores.

As the summer heats up and another monster storm begins twisting its way towards St. Medard’s Bay, Geneva learns that some people can be just as destructive—and as deadly—as any hurricane, and that the truth of what happened to Landon Fitzroy may not be the only secret Lo is keeping…