Lies We Told

In my quest to finish all of my BOTM books and because I love the color purple, I finally picked up Lies We Told and wow, was I engrossed. It’s a multi-layered drama that reminds me a lot of Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent but I loved it. What is it about thrillers set in Britain that draw me in so much more than ones set stateside?

There are two main strains in Lies We Told, and yes, you guessed it, they converge. But maybe not in the way you imagined. There’s the story of a woman in the 1980s raising a problematic daughter. Not just one who argues and doesn’t obey, but one who may be doing horrible things. What lengths will her daughter go to to punish her for the sins she thinks her mother committed?

In modern day London, Clara’s boyfriend, Luke, has gone missing. It doesn’t help that for the past few months he’s been getting weird, disturbing emails from a strange woman. And when the police find a stolen van with a pool of Luke’s blood in it…things don’t look good. Then, Clara is contacted by someone from Luke’s past and she is led down a rabbit hole that will intertwine these two narratives and keep you entranced until the last page.

This book is like a lot of other books, but that’s kind of what made me love it. It’s interesting, it’s British without being Casual Vacancy-level British, and layered. It’s predictable, but not in the “I know exactly how it’s going to end” way but rather “there are only so many ways these stories can intertwine” way and I enjoyed it. Both the narrative voices were strong and while I think the past-story was a LITTLE bit more well done than the modern day story, I really enjoyed this book and crashed through it in one fowl swoop.