The Ex

• Author: Shalini Boland 
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: January 15, 2026
• Publisher: Brilliance Publishing

Thank you to NetGalley and Brilliance Publishing for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

A dark past. A fresh start. A new nightmare waiting to begin.

Willow McAllister is desperate to start over. Quiet town. Blank slate. No attachments. When she meets her friendly new neighbour, Priya, it feels like a the start of something good.

And then there’s charming, funny, easy to talk to Gabe. Maybe she’s allowed a little happiness. Maybe she can trust again.

But Willow’s instincts have been wrong before. And when she discovers that Gabe and Priya share a past, the cracks start to show. Willow can’t help wondering if Priya’s arrival next door really was by chance. Because coincidences like this? They don’t feel like coincidences at all.

Is she imagining the tension between them? Or ignoring something she shouldn’t?

Someone is lying.

And Willow can’t afford to get it wrong again.

I have been reading a lot of the mystery genre lately, so it was natural that this would appeal to me. The fact that it was an audiobook only made this more appealing, since I like to lose myself in the story. 

Katie Villa was the narrator, and I think she did a fantastic job. She voices characters who are very different from each other, and does so believably. She did wonderfully with the different timelines, and I enjoyed listening to her reading.

There are two very different timelines in the story. One features Jasmine and her increasingly abusive husband, Adam. The other timeline focuses on Willow and her fresh start. We don’t actually learn how these two women are connected until very close to the end. 

This is a fast-paced story. I found myself unable to put it down, with a lot happening over the course of the book. Shortly into the story, the tension begins to build with both predictable and unpredictable events. It felt completely organic as the tension continues to slowly ratchet up until the completely unpredictable end. I love a story with good tension and unpredictable twists, so this was right up my alley. There are some predictable twists and some that blindsided me, but none more so than the events at the end of the book. 

It’s hard to really discuss more than this without giving anything away, so I want to instead shift to my own reading experience. The story was fast moving and engaging all the way through, but I didn’t fully connect with either Jasmine or Willow. Initially, Jasmine wasn’t a bad character, but once her husband begins to display red flags, I was so disappointed in her for making excuses for him. For the majority of the book, readers are treated to the course of Jasmine’s days—not working or going to school, therefore no need to keep her car insured, keeping her distant from friends and relatives and basically anyone other than him, and I couldn’t understand why she continued to make excuses for him when there was only one answer for his actions. 

Don’t get me wrong—I know how difficult and dangerous it is to leave an abusive partner. There are many reasons that a person stays with an abusive partner, and stupidity is not one of them. Instead, readers see the increasingly abusive behaviors of Adam towards Jasmine and exactly how difficult it is for her to escape once his patterns escalate to a scary level. Slowly, he begins to chip away at her various types of freedoms—employment, seeing friends, transportation, finances, even a tracker on her phone, until she is nearly confined to the house and completely isolated. My issue with Jasmine wasn’t that she didn’t leave, it was that she continued to make excuses to herself rather than admit that there was a problem. 

Willow, on the other hand, is getting a fresh start. It’s clear that she’s been through some kind of trauma or abuse and is working on healing in her new life. She’s closed off emotionally, which reads as realistic. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t have believed her as a trauma or abuse survivor. However, other aspects of her behavior didn’t feel as natural. For someone who has survived abuse, she is somewhat oblivious to certain things and doesn’t have the reactivity that I’ve seen from others in that situation. Additionally, she gaslights herself, which I wouldn’t expect to see as much as she does.

Overall, this was a gripping and fast-paced read that is easy to finish in a day. The story has a relatively fast pace and it’s very engaging despite my feelings about both Willow and Jasmine along with the men in their lives. I would have liked to see more of a friendship bloom between Willow and Priya and learn more about her character, since she came across as one-dimensional. If I was able to connect with either of the characters, I might have enjoyed the book more.

Bottom line: A fun read but neither timeline has an easily likable character.

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