Book review: Uncovered by Emily Snow

This book is so totally different from everything else Emily Snow has written so far. Different in the very best way!

My name is Lizzie Connelly, and I have it all. The gorgeous apartment. The new job most women would rip out their own souls for—working for Margaret Emerson at Emerson & Taylor. I have one of those lives you’ve always dreamt about, the kind you only see on HBO. But, the thing is, that life is a lie. A façade.

It all started with one call. “Everything you know about your story—your father’s story—is a lie. It’s up to you to uncover everything.” One call, and I turned my world upside down to dig my way into Margaret’s life—the woman who I’d never laid eyes on until recently. My stepmother who took everything after my father died fourteen years ago.

The plan was simple—figure out what role she played in my father’s death and expose her to the world.

But here’s another thing: simplicity doesn’t exist, and my plans are flawed from the beginning because I never anticipated Oliver. Sexy, too smart for his own goddamn good, and infuriating, he’s the one person who could blow my plans to uncover Margaret. She’s his mother, and in another life, that would have made him my stepbrother.

I want to pretend that none of that matters, that I can simply finish what I came to do without sparing him a second glance and another thought.

Like I said, though, there’s no such thing as simplicity.

My real name is Gemma Emerson.

And this is my story.

When Gemma Emerson arrives in L.A. she has only three things to do: Uncover. Expose. And get the hell out of there.

She puts on a façade and starts to live her life as Lizzie Connelly who digs through the circumstances of her father’s death to uncover the truth of what really happened. It should all be easy if there wasn’t Oliver Manning. He wasn’t part of the plan, getting involved clearly wasn’t part of the plan and falling for him is no option. 

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

When Gemma thinks of the past she sees herself as a teenager without parents, struggling to make it. Her father left everything to her stepmother and she was left with nothing. Or was she? After a mysterious phone call Gemma decides to go digging into the life her father and stepmother shared and expose the truth.

Emily Snow did it again and presents a book that isn’t purely romance. Gemma and Oliver are drawn to each other but there’s more than a stepmonster standing in the way. Gemma is hiding the truth about her real life, her real identity and mostly her real reasons why she started working at Emerson & Taylor. 

Maybe it’s her writing style, maybe it’s the words she chose, maybe it’s the story, or maybe it’s just the whole package. This book is so different from other novels. There are so many twists you lose count and so many reasons there possibly won’t be a happy ending that I anxiously turned each page, waiting for the moment when everything blows up right into Gemma’s face. And of course that happens. Because doesn’t it always? But how it happened wasn’t one of the options that were running through my head the whole time. 

Living so many lies that you’re not even sure anymore what’s true or not is how Gemma spends most of the time in Oliver’s presence. She tells herself not to fall for him, her best friend reminds her not to fall for him, but Oliver gives her every reason to do just that.

Can she be honest and tell him the whole truth about what his mother has been up to since her father died? Will he turn his back on her once he finds out? Or will she go back to her old life after getting the answers she needed?

This book is fabulous. I couldn’t put it down and loved every minute I spent with these characters.