Anne turned me onto this book thanks to Sager’s previous book Final Girls. Neither of us have read Final Girls yet but The Last Time I Lied just so happened to work for a readathon we were doing, so I picked it up first. I still consider myself new to the thriller genre but I think I may soon become a fan. Here’s my review.
Let’s start with a basic premise. This book is about Emma, a mildly successful artist who is asked to return to a camp she went to as a kid to teach art. The first and only time she went to that camp, her three cabin mates went missing and never returned. Emma swore she knew who the killer was and placed the blame on the young and handsome son of the camp’s owner. Nothing ever came of her accusation but it did ruin the life of that young man. So why is Francesca Harris-White (the owner) asking Emma back? How will Theo, the boy (now a man) she accused, react? And what will happen when old secrets Emma has been holding onto slowly become known?
Riley Sager’s first book Final Girls has a slasher horror feeling to it and this one gives off heavy Camp Crystal Lake and Scooby Doo vibes. That’s what drew me to Sager’s work. This idea that he took a familiar plot but ran his own way with it.
The Last Time I Lied was a well paced book that jumped between the past and the present at just the right times keeping the reader guessing. The reveals were well paced too. Anything Emma discovered or revealed came at the right time to keep my interest piqued and the flow of the story moving.
The characters were good too and more complex than I thought they would be. Emma didn’t change all that much but I didn’t mind because she was the vessel used for storytelling and it allowed the other characters to be more fleshed out. There was a great similarity between Emma’s cabin mates when she was a kid and the campers she was placed in charge of as an adult. This is the one place in the book where Emma’s growth from child to adult can be seen.
As the story unfolds we learn more and more about each and every character and, as I read it, I changed my guess on “whodunit” quite a few times. I was ultimately wrong and Anne, who is a veteran thriller reader, guessed part of the ending, which is more than I could do. So if you’re familiar with the genre, you may see some it coming, but if you’re a newbie you may be fully surprised.
This book kept me turning the pages and kept me engrossed the entire time. It was enjoyable from beginning to end and I believe it would make for a good Good Omens-esque mini-series.
If you’re not a huge fan of thrillers or even never picked on up, I think this would be a perfect book for you to pick up.
The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager gets an 8 out of 11