This is one of those books where there are 5-10 suspects and they're all so fucking bat-shit crazy that any of them could be behind the crimes. And are all the crimes related or were they each committed by different people? Well, do learn that, you'll have to read that book.

I've always enjoyed Megan's books and this one didn't disappoint. In fact, it may be my favorite of hers yet!

I loved our MC Rosie. The number of times I was yelling about how absolutely nutty she was. The people in this were so insane as characters! Their choices are questionable at best, but that's what makes it fun!

The plot was twisty and surprising. I was able to guess who the overall bad guy was at about the half-way point but how we got there and the extent of their madness? That was all a fun ride of surprise.

Cross Your Heart has a really intriguing premise that initially drew me in. I appreciated the unique storytelling approach, especially the mixed media format with emails, texts, and other digital communication, which added a fresh layer of depth to the narrative. It helped keep the story engaging and provided a nice variety to the typical format.

The plot itself was twisty and entertaining for the most part, with enough suspense to keep me hooked throughout. There were some interesting developments and moments that kept me curious about what would happen next. However, while the story was definitely entertaining, I didn’t find any of the twists to be jaw-dropping or particularly shocking. Some of the reveals felt a bit predictable or didn't hit as hard as I was hoping for, leaving me with a sense of "okay, that makes sense," rather than being completely taken by surprise.

Overall, *Cross Your Heart* was an enjoyable read, but it didn’t quite live up to the level of excitement I was expecting. It’s definitely a fun read if you're looking for something to pass the time with, but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me.

This book was so interesting! The way that Megan develops her characters, and the tertiary characters is amazing. I really enjoyed reading this and cannot wait to see what Megan does next. I recommend this book to everyone who likes a good domestic thriller!

Killer book. I have read Megan Collins books before, but I feel certain this one is my favorite! Definitely give this one your time!

Very much enjoyed this! Full of twists I didn’t see coming & fast paced. Would absolutely recommend. Thank you for the early copy Atria!

Megan Collins is great at writing twisty page-turners. This was a solid 3.5 for me. And the main character desperately needs therapy!

It starts with a dedication to anyone who has ever related to Taylor Swift’s The Prophecy 🥹

What follows is a very twisty thriller in which a woman, one year after a heart transplant, starts messaging the husband of her heart donor with the hope of things turning romantic.

💘 this one was so twisty I couldn’t put it down
💗 unreliable narrators everywhere!
🥰 emails, texts, messages, and a narrative has you questioning your recollection and your mind

I don’t want to give anything away, but this one is for you if you’re a Swiftie. This one is also for anyone who has ever been called or made to feel “crazy” by someone they’ve dated. It’s for people who have been gaslit. It’s for people who have so much hope they might get a little ahead of themselves or dream up whole lives that may never come to fruition. It takes the pressure put on women, in particular, to find “the one” and explodes it.

I guessed some of the twists, but my jaw was on the floor at one point!

Cross My Heart by Megan Collins is a thrilling ride start from finish. With so many twist and turns you think you figure out the mystery and then a new layer is added to blow the reader away. This mystery was quirky while pulling at your heart strings while unraveling the story with the main character. By the end I found myself adding Megan Collins to my list of authors to watch for as I picked up my jaw from the floor. Ultimately Cross My Heart was a fun and quick mystery that scratched the murder mystery itch that comes after a mild book hangover.

Heart transplants that come with a whole lot more.
Cross My Heart written by Megan Collins brings a suspenseful story with twists and confusion, perhaps too many. A woman with pink hair and an obsessive personality has a heart transplant after a break-up.
Slowly we learn all the things she did prior to getting sick and it shows she needed help to cope better with the curve balls being thrown at you each day. Fast-forward to learning her heart came from the wife of a famous author, and she died under somewhat strange circumstances. Collins brought in so much drama with double identity and hidden agendas, it became hard to follow when two characters, in some ways, had the same name. Readers can keep track of it, but you still want to know what's really happening. So I found myself both loving and not loving the plot.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to preview this book!!!!

This book goes between emails and present time chapters.

Rosie just gets a heart transplant and she starts to fall for her recipients husband. She starts to wonder what it would be like to be with him. Then the book takes a turn and we don’t know what’s true or in her mind.


This book literally made me say out loud, “What the hell is happening!!?” I loved the suspense and really not knowing what was truly going on!!!
The only thing that was redundant was her constant reenactment of her boyfriend breaking up with her. She was obsessed.

The ending was perfect in my opinion it was great close to the book!!!

I am a huge fan of Megan Collins so i was very excited to receive this advanced reader copy of her newest book Cross My Heart. It did not disappoint! from the very beginning, i was sucked into the story of Rosie and how she is so unlucky in love until she connects with the widowed husband of the woman whose heart she received in a transplant.
She is so desperate to be in love, she has a lot of stalker tendencies that she just sees as her trying to learn as much as she can about her current crush so she can change herself to be their perfect person.

When she meets Mogan through the online donor connect email, she immediately starts up by telling him she loves things that she finds out about him on his social media presence. Soon they are together, depict her family & friends' objections, but she soon stops trusting hr new husband as although she has his wife's heart, she wonders if his deceased wife died as an accident as she was told or if he had something to do with.

the book will suck you in from the first page and y0u will not be able to stop reading until you get to the end.

DAMN! This book transcended all other thrillers for me. And just when I thought that I figured out the twist and patted myself on the back, the author laughed and I realized, I KNOW NOTHING! At first, I was discomforted by Rosie's personality. She was definitely channeling the cringeness of Anna Kendrick's character in "A Simple Favor." But a much deeper plot is quickly reveal and totally sucked me in.

We follow Rosie who has just emailed her heart donor's husband on the anniversary of her transplant. She's had suspicions of his identity and confirms it as she reads between the lines of his replies. This book uses their "anonymous" emails to fill in the blanks as Rosie tells her story. But then he starts to email his friends about Rosie and I was obsessed reading them. It was a genius way to get inside his head instead of giving him POV chapters. When someone ends up dead and the police go through all of the messages, you start to see the discrepancies. It's brilliant!

I think Megan Collins has outdone herself and every comparable thriller. There's a rivalry element between literary spouses that reminded me of "Verity". But Rosie's protectiveness of her donor made it more palatable to me. So even as she's falling in love with her donor's husband, she has a sense of love for the woman who died and donated her heart. It's boldly feminine and feminist. The twist and shock factor felt as glorious as reading "Never Lie" by Freida McFadden but it happens much earlier in the story, so it was more satisfying. And the cat and mouse dynamic where Rosie knows everything about the husband before they've even met filled me with the same perverse excitement as watching the Netflix show "You." I will be sharing this with all my girlfriends and then debating which character we would be.

What begins as a heart transplant recipient’s simple desire to thank a donor’s family quickly spirals into an unsettling obsession.

I thoroughly enjoyed this clever psychological thriller. The premise is both original and compelling, with just the right amount of red herrings and twists to keep the tension high—especially in the first half, which propels the story through to a gripping conclusion. It was a fast-paced and entertaining read, and I’d definitely pick up more from this author. Highly recommended for mystery and thriller fans looking for a suspenseful ride!

There was something about this story that kept it from being totally compelling. Maybe it was Rosie’s compulsive behavior or maybe it was the multiple story lines that were hard to separate at times. The Morgan Thorne character was vindictive; Rosie was kind but desperate. Regardless the story was interesting and I had the killer wrong in the end and I am somewhat optimistic that Rosie will grow up and find her happy ever after.
3.5 Stars

Megan Collins does it again! She is quickly becoming a favorite thriller author of mine, and this book was no exception!

I was at the edge of my seat throughout the book and truly couldn’t predict all of the crazy twists and turns. One of the most unique premises for a thriller I’ve read in a long time I highly recommend!

What a seriously wild and twisty thriller! It was fast-paced, and I loved the way the story was told.

Poor Rosie just wants to find the one, and she's been emailing with the husband of the woman whose heart was donated to her. Is this her chance at true love?

This book was a complex story of secrets, obsessive, and heartbreak. It was gripping and kept me guessing all the way through.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Thanks to @netgalley and @atriabooks for my early copy!

I adore Megan Collins and was super excited to get an advanced copy of her latest, CROSS MY HEART. First and foremost, the dedication shot straight through my Swiftie heart and then the note about the safety of the animals in this book reassured my heart.

The synopsis of CROSS MY HEART sounded off the wall but in the best way possible. I knew I needed to read it and after three heavier books, it was the perfect palate cleanser. I mean, a woman receives a heart transplant and begins to fall for the donor’s husband?! Sign me up!

Our FMC is Rosie and boy is she something. She so desperately wants to be in love and get her happy ending that she always wears “Rosie colored glasses” according to her best friend Nina. Rosie is quick to fall and makes questionable decisions - see all the flashbacks to her previous relationships. I found myself falling into the societal norm of “damn, that girl is crazy” but the more I read and the way Collins wrote Rosie, I couldn’t help but recognize that wanting to be in love doesn’t make someone too emotional or crazy.

Don’t get me wrong, Rosie makes poor decisions and had me yelling more than a handful of times, but in the end, I couldn’t fault her for wanting to be happy and in love. Also, the way the story unfolds and reveals the twists worked really well and one in particular left me 🤯.

I had lots of theories (ask @andrea.c.lowry.reads 🤣) and turns out, none were correct! This is a huge win in a thriller for me.

Highly recommend if you love popcorn thrillers, unhinged characters, twists, and Taylor Swift 🫶🏼

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley. Review based on final copy. All opinions are my own.
I originally saw Cross My Heart promoted as being inspired by Taylor Swift, so of course I had to read it. Upon doing so, I feel rather mixed, especially as I feel like I had a different impression of the book than what it turned out to be. And in some ways, that’s a good thing, especially as a thriller, but it also missed the mark a bit for me.
Narratively, I did enjoy the story. The first part of the book had me set up for one very predictable plot, only to pull the rug out and pivot at around 50% for part two. While part two is much more heightened and ridiculous, requiring much more suspension of disbelief, the first part has its own subtle trippy quality leading up to it.
I do like that Megan Collins did her due diligence in researching heart transplant recipients, shouting out the story of one donor in particular who passed on as the story went to print. But this poignant tribute in the acknowledgments feels odd when the story does little to endear the reader to Rosie, the heart transplant recipient in the book. She’s not unsympathetic, as she has gone through some real struggles, from health issues to relationship trouble, but she’s not even unhinged in a compelling way, like I thought she would be, when I heard the premise about a transplant recipient being obsessed with her donor’s husband. She’s just kind of naive and unlikable, the way a lot of domestic thriller (and thriller more generally) protagonists often are (something the book also takes a jab at).
Not that the other characters were all that interesting. Despite the fact that all the women in the book seem to fall all over him, Morgan is flat and uninteresting as well, and he and pretty much everyone else are meant to be untrustworthy anyway. Again, another feature of domestic thrillers, although at least here, the mess delivered once the characters’ secrets were revealed.
As for the Taylor references, I can sort of see where Collins is coming from with some of them, but not others. Using “You Belong with Me” and (especially) “Love Story” as the names of the parts felt very misleading, although that may be the literalist in me speaking, in terms of the content of those specific songs. The dedication name-dropping “The Prophecy” does make some sense, but I still feel it missed the mark.
All in all, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I am curious to try something else from Megan Collins to see if something else by her works for me a bit better. And with domestic thrillers often being rather hit-or-miss for me, I do feel this may work better for those who enjoy the domestic thriller genre more.

I really enjoyed this book and was surprised at how it went. Rosie needed a heart transplant and she received a new heart from Morgan Thornes deceased wife. Rosie and Morgan starts talking through a donor system and then strange things start happening.

What a ride this book was. I love a fast paced thriller that isn’t one that is too twisted to keep me up at night, and this was the perfect book for that. The premise itself was completely wild. Rosie received a heart transplant and now is in contact with her donors widow, and she wants it to be more than just a casual contact. They get into contact using DonorConnect, and begin to develop a relationship of sorts, which onyl goes haywire from there. I loved the integration of the email correspondence in this book. I thought it was a perfect way to move the plot along without feeling too lazy. It also gave us better character development, which I appreciated. At the midway point of the book, my jaw literally dropped. I do have to say, however, I prefer shorter chapters in thrillers that are more succinct, this one felt like some of it dragged a bit at times. By the end, however, I was definitely excited to figure out what happened and I loved all the twists along the way. This is an example of a book where all the characters are a little unlikeable, but it didn’t take me out of the book, which I appreciated. Overall, a very fun thriller that is perfect for a binge read. 3.75/5 stars.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced reading copy of this book. All opinions within this review are my own.