Here's a book to help pass a lazy summer day (assuming the weather eventually allows for a day lying on the beach with a book, that is): Never Knowing.

This psychological thriller is from Chevy Stevens, the acclaimed Vancouver Island author of Still Missing.

I say this is an excellent beach read because you'll find you can't put the book down for more than a moment once you pick it up, so have an open day planned.

Sara Gallagher is approaching her wedding date, and the niggling questions she has always had about her birth parents are becoming impossible to ignore. She doesn't want to upset her adoptive parents or two younger sisters they had naturally, but she really needs to have a sense of her own roots before committing to her future, so begins a search that opens a most dangerous door.

When Sara finds her biological mother, the woman is less than pleased to meet her. In fact, she seems terrified.

It isn't long before Sara discovers the reason: her mother was the only known victim to escape a serial killer who stalks and kills women every summer, a man who appears to also be her biological father.

And of course a secret that big and juicy cannot remain hidden for long. Somehow the fact the campsite killer is her father hits the internet and all hell breaks loose for Sara, daughter and fiancé as well as her adoptive family and biological mother.

Stevens has a knack for capturing difficult family dynamics while building a breathless, twisting plot that rushes to an unexpected but inevitable conclusion.

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