The secret beach (by Veronica Henry)

(Amazon UK link)

I’ve liked all the books I’ve read by Veronica Henry. So when I saw her novel ‘The secret beach’ at a church bookstall a few months ago, it was an easy decision to buy it. I’ve just spent the last few days reading it. 

The main protagonist is a woman called Nikki, who is in her early forties. We first meet her in a prologue set twenty years before the main story, where she’s about to meet someone on a secret beach. She is going to say something which they will both find difficult, but we don’t learn what this is until much later in the book.

The main story opens as Nikki finds a house that she loves, not far from where she grew up. It’s near a special beach, and she falls for it as soon as she sees it. It needs a lot of work done, but she’s still surprised to learn that she’s able to buy it without any competition. A lot of the book then follows the gradual transformation of her new home, culminating in a housewarming party.

Nikki is a single mother who has a young adult son, Bill, who is currently travelling in Indonesia. His father, Woody, was her closest friend before they started a romantic relationship, and they still get along well. She’s a successful businesswoman, working all hours as a wedding planner. She is very well-organised, and has plenty of ideas; she also loves working with people and making their wishes come true. 

So when she finds her dream home, everything seems perfect. She even has a rather attractive and very nice neighbour called Adam, who was widowed a few years earlier and who lives with his dog. Then Nikki starts receiving anonymous postcards, hinting that something in the past needs to come to light…

We don’t learn exactly what this deep secret involves until nearer the end of the book, but it becomes fairly obvious within a few chapters. So obvious, indeed, that I wondered if I was wrong, and if there was going to be something a whole lot worse. 

I find it slightly annoying when teasers of this kind are dropped early in a book but not revealed until the end - it feels a little like online ‘click-bait’. I don’t mind when something is revealed that the main character doesn’t know about, or when there’s a surprise or shock (so long as it’s foreshadowed in some way). But when the main character feels terrible about something, it’s frustrating not to know what it is - and as a result I read rather more quickly than I would otherwise have done, with a bit of skimming in a few places.

Despite that, it’s an interesting story, involving some lifeboat rescues, and the annual memorial of a terrible disaster that hit the village twenty years earlier. Every so often there’s a flashback chapter that tells us what Nikki was doing just before this event, and also hinting more strongly at her secret. Not that the beach itself seems all that secret, since other people go there, and boats sometimes land there. 

I liked Nikki, and even more liked her widowed mother Helen who holds her family together well. Nikki has a sister, Jess, who is rather self-centered, and very different from her. Jess is also a single mother, and has an adult daughter called Juno who sings well and walks dogs for a living. Their brother Graham is married with three daughters.  They all live locally, and regularly get together. I thought Helen was a very likeable woman, and enjoyed her low-key subplot as she decides the time has come to start online dating.

So it’s essentially a character-based village/seaside book, with a little more meat than many, and some interesting insights into wedding planning and lifeboat teams. Maybe everyone is a bit too good to be true; other than Jess, they’re all good people. And even Jess’s heart is in the right place, despite her being rather demanding and selfish at times. I did wonder who could be sending the nasty cards, but in a sense that storyline peters out instead of coming to a showdown.

It’s well-written, with nothing at all explicit, though of course there are implications of intimacies. I don’t recall any bad language, either. So, on the whole, I liked it although it’s not my favourite of this author’s books.

If you like fairly gentle character-based women's fiction, this could make good holiday reading. 

Review copyright 2026 Sue's Book Reviews