The Reading Bud

Book Details:

Author: Connor Wilson
Release Date: August 14, 2026
Series:
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Format: E-book
Pages: 191
Publisher: –
Blurb:
YouTube star Everett Keyes is found dead in the Central Pine Barrens. The police rule it a suicide. His cousin Olivia can’t believe it. Neither can his girlfriend, who insists Everett was making plans, not saying goodbyes. Searching for answers, Olivia finds a video on his computer that someone would kill to bury. She launches her own investigation into Everett’s death before a warning arrives at her door: stop digging. But Olivia can’t stop: someone

Review

On One Knee by Connor Wilson is a contemporary crime thriller that combines a disastrous romantic gesture, a double murder and a dual-timeline investigation into one increasingly dangerous mystery. Amanda Vale is preparing to leave New York, and perhaps her troubled relationship with Lucas Carrigan, when Lucas arranges a carefully planned weekend in the Hamptons. Several weeks later, Olivia Meade is mourning the apparent suicide of her cousin Everett, a successful YouTuber whose final days seem entirely inconsistent with a man intending to end his life. When Olivia and Everett’s girlfriend, Kylie, discover disturbing footage on his computer, the two narratives begin moving inexorably towards the same violent truth.

The novel’s strongest feature is its interlocking chronology. Wilson alternates between Amanda and Lucas’s final days and Olivia’s subsequent investigation, allowing readers to understand certain events before the characters do while still withholding enough information to sustain the mystery. Details that initially appear incidental like a WhatsApp message, a video file, an unfinished promotional clip and a partial licence plate gradually become crucial pieces of evidence. The title is especially effective, acquiring several increasingly sinister meanings as romance, humiliation and mortal danger converge.

Olivia, Kylie and Teddy give the investigative half of the novel much of its energy and warmth. Their alliance develops through shared grief, conflicting suspicions and the urgent desire to protect Everett’s memory, while their differing skills make the amateur investigation feel purposeful. Kylie is particularly engaginga as her determination to understand what happened to Everett prevents her from being reduced to the grieving girlfriend, and her contribution to the resolution is both memorable and fitting. The novel also makes perceptive use of contemporary technology, showing how online visibility, stored footage, location sharing and digital habits can simultaneously expose a crime and place witnesses in danger.

The suspense could have been even more forceful with a somewhat leaner approach to exposition. Several theories, discoveries and emotional reactions are explained repeatedly after their significance is already apparent, while the extended final confrontation pauses to clarify nearly every element of the crime at the moment when urgency should be at its highest. A little more restraint here, and greater trust in the reader to connect the evidence, would sharpen the pacing considerably. Certain aspects of the police procedure and the eventual rescue also depend upon convenient timing, although the novel’s momentum carries the reader through most of these contrivances.

Nonetheless, On One Knee is an inventive and highly readable thriller about obsession, betrayal and the perilous difference between recording a story and controlling it. Wilson transforms the familiar image of a marriage proposal into something genuinely ominous and constructs a mystery in which digital evidence can be manipulated almost as easily as public opinion. Readers who enjoy shifting timelines, amateur investigators and technologically grounded crime fiction will find this a fast-paced story with an appealing central trio and several well-positioned revelations.

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