Mack and Hailey Evans have done everything right. A custom home in a coveted neighborhood. Prestigious careers—Hailey as a high-powered divorce attorney, Mack as a celebrated professor who quietly fancies himself the next Hemingway and two wonderful daughters. But beneath the polished surface, cracks (iykyk) are already spreading. Hailey is staring down a client who owes her firm a staggering sum. Mack is hiding both an investigation into inappropriate relationships with students and a family history he has never fully shared. Then the checks start arriving. Large ones. Unexplained ones. And with each deposit, the question sharpens—is this money solving their problems, or engineering something far more dangerous?
Told through alternating points of view between Mack, Hailey, and a chilling unknown narrator with a godlike vantage point, Lauren Schott builds tension with surgical precision. This is a story about erosion. Small compromises stack quietly. Boundaries blur. Then, all at once, everything gives way. The unknown narrator doles out just enough backstory to keep you guessing, pulling strings you didn’t even realize were there. The red herrings are perfectly placed, the moral ground constantly shifting, and the constant reminder that no one here is innocent. As their professional and personal lives collapse in tandem, Mack and Hailey find themselves unable to trust each other—or their own judgment.
What makes this novel hit so hard is how deeply relatable its descent feels. Financial pressure. Career anxiety. Aging parents. The quiet terror of realizing that “enough” never really feels like enough, always wanting more, chasing a dream and what boundaries are we willing to push to get those things. Schott shows us how fragile stability really is, and how quickly security can curdle into chaos. The result is an unhinged, slow burn, domestic thriller that tightens page by page, choice by choice. If this is her debut, sign me up immediately for whatever she writes next.
PS - I love how the title of the book Very Slowly All at Once is a nod to Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises since Mack had dreams of being the next Hemingway.
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