Lies She Told had been getting a little bit of hype on my GR feed. When it appeared on the What's Hot section of my library, I decided to give it a chance. I'd been wanting to get back into adult psychological thrillers for a while anyway... but this was not the book to hook me on the genre.

Why didn't it work for me?

First of all, I am not going to even deny that I dropped an entire star for the use of the Bury Your Gays trope. I'm so not here for that. I was also not a big fan of the way that mental illness was treated in this story. It felt entirely unrealistic. I mean, really, having a type of trauma-induced amnesia that makes you forget that you had depression? Yeah, no. Depression is something that affects your daily life; even in recovery, your symptoms are not nonexistent, especially without ongoing (conscious) effort. The fact that her friends and family would purposefully hide Liza's history of mental illness from her was hard to wrap my head around. Do they really not understand that that is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible? For so many reasons! The poor depression representation (if that is what it was even meant to be) could have been fixed if the author had simply made it clear that suicidal ideation and depression are not mutually exclusive.

Also, the Trinidadian love interest’s skin colour was described using a food analogue. Ick.

Mainly, though, it was a personal thing. It is just my luck that the first adult thriller I picked up since I decided to get back into the genre had so many elements I tend to avoid: cheating, pregnancy/newborns... and amnesia. I despise amnesia being used in mysteries to create suspense. It is a real psychological condition that deserves most respect, for one thing, but is also a lazy writing tool. There is a difference between having an unreliable narrator and manipulating the narrator to ‘forget’ certain information to build suspense.

Adding to that, I did not like any of the characters, especially Liza, and the writing style was a bit of a miss for me. It was to the point and lacked a lot of detail. This helped drive the story forward, yes, but I would have liked some more time spent on the characterisation.

I will say that the idea of having an author’s fiction and reality blur was fantastic. It worked well and, for a thriller, it did its job to keep me on my toes. It was incredibly predictable but it definitely succeeded in keeping me engaged throughout the story.

Overall?

This definitely had the potential to be suspenseful and engaging. I loved how it featured authors and writing at its forefront, and the blurring of reality was done well. It just needed to write about mental illness from a place of respect, rather than twisting it to suit a story, and not kill off literally every queer character.

➸ Trigger warnings for

suicide, homomisia, murder, forced coming out, pregnancy & fertility-related medical conditions, depression, and child sexual abuse & rape

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