Blog Tour: No Safe Haven | LK Chapman | Random Things Tours | #nosafehaven @lk_chapman @RandomTTours

I was excited to be able to join the book tour for LK Chapman’s latest psychological thriller about a woman on the run harboring a lot of secrets. Steady pacing and non-stop plot reveals make LK Chapman’s No Safe Haven difficult to set aside without reading straight through. An intriguing story with a delightfully twisted ending!

About the Book | No Safe Haven (Goodreads)

Will she ever escape her past?

Poppy’s life has never been easy. Becoming a mum at sixteen, falling out with her family and being abandoned by her boyfriend has left her feeling lost and alone, but her son is a ray of light in her life and the pair form a strong bond: It’s the two of them against the world.

Many years later, with her son grown up and away at university, Poppy arrives desperate, exhausted and half-starved to a pretty doorstep, hoping to find sanctuary in the home of her old school friend Harriet – and it is clear things have gone horribly wrong.

Finding Harriet living with her sister Jessica and nephew Reef, Poppy soon settles into a comfortable life in their rural village, helping Harriet in her delightful fabric shop, and believing the sisters have offered her a way to start again with a clean slate.

But as the hardships she has fled catch up with her, and cracks in the sister’s strange relationship begin to show, Poppy is suspicious of Harriet’s true motivations for helping her and fears her only option will be to flee once again.

With bonds between the three women tested to breaking point, and dark secrets revealed, will Poppy find safety and happiness, or has she simply fled one nightmare to end up in another?

No Safe Haven is a twisty tale of friendship, family and loyalty in a world where everyone has something to hide.

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Review | No Safe Haven

The book opens on a woman named Poppy arriving at a unfamiliar home, hoping to find a safe place to stay with her childhood friend Harriet. The description of the house and town where Harriet lives seems like it is in a different world from the shabby apartment where Poppy came from. The way Chapman describes the home is magical and set a tone that made me feel from the first chapter like Poppy has entered somewhere that seems too good to be true:

“Had I fallen into a fairytale? The gently flowing stream I was now crossing via a pretty humped bridge was certainly nothing like the vast estuary I could just about glimpse from the kitchen window in my old flat. That river had huge gantry cranes on the opposite bank set against a sky that more often than not was slate grey. This river was surrounded by nothing more forbidding than front gardens where bird feeders hung from trees and bright winter berries adorned bare branches like tiny jewels.”

The more we learn about Poppy’s past and what brought her to this tiny village, the more stark this contrast seemed. Behind Poppy are terrible secrets that have made her flee, not even telling her son Dominic at university where she is. In her present, Poppy is staying in the most adorable cottage in a town that sounds straight out of a fairy tale, living with two sisters who own an adorable fabric shop in town called Bits and Bobbins. It’s hard to imagine anything worse happening in this town than someone cheating in the annual scarecrow competition. This truly seems like a safe haven, but as the title implies…it may not be as safe as it seems.

The sisters—Harriet and Jess—couldn’t be more different from one another. Harriet was Poppy’s best friend from high school, but they lost touch when Poppy get pregnant as a teenager and soon became a single mum, struggling to make ends meet. Harriet is serious and pragmatic. She’s gone through a divorce after a long marriage and she’s taken over the shop and home from her parents when her sister Jess came home pregnant with her son Reef—so named because she met his father near the sea.

Jess is a fascinating character. In every way that Harriet is serious and logical, Jess seems to be the fairy tale princess fitting of their charming home and town. At one point Harriet says that Jess “just can’t see reality”. And though at times Jess can seem flighty and in her own world, she has a charm to her that pulls others in.

Over the course of the book, Poppy begins to reveal the secrets of her past and what happened since she left home as a pregnant teenager. Poppy is reluctant to share her secrets, which I thought was odd at first since Harriet and Jess were taking her in, but the more that she revealed the more I understood just how dark her past is. Poppy is holding onto secrets that wouldn’t just destroy herself, they could destroy her son Dominic. And despite any bad thing someone could say about Poppy, she is the type of mother who will do anything to protect her child.

Meanwhile something seemed off with Harriet and Jess. They seem to be hiding secrets of their own, and the reader gets the distinct feeling that everything might not be so charming and shiny as it appears on the surface of their life. It appears that both Poppy and the sisters have ulterior motives they aren’t sharing, and I wondered who to trust.

As the title implies, there is no safe haven. Through twists and turns, I pondered at every new bombshell revelation whether the title was referring to Poppy’s past or her present. Or perhaps both…

The twists just keep coming and the reveal of the true horrific nature of Poppy’s past isn’t fully revealed until almost the end. And just when you think you have it figured out, another revelation will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about these characters.

A gripping novel of psychological suspense. Thank you to Anne at Random Things Tours for providing me a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Book Tour | Upcoming Schedule

I was excited to be up first to help kick off this blog tour, but please follow along with me as the other great hosts share their thoughts on No Safe Haven! I’m grateful to Anne at Random Things Tours for the opportunity to participate, and I’m looking forward to reading the other reviews on this tour. Find the full schedule below and follow along!

About the Author | LK Chapman

LK Chapman writes books about relationships, family drama, secrets and lies – from dark and disturbing tales of obsession and jealousy, to twisty thrillers with a dash of romance – her passion is creating characters that get under your skin and stories that keep you gripped.