★★★★☆
August 3rd – 5th
The Last Time I Lied is the second novel from mystery/thriller writer Riley Sager, and the second that I’ve read by him.
In this one, we follow Emma Davis, an up-and-coming painter in the New York City art scene. Fifteen years ago, Emma attended a sleep away camp called Camp Nightingale, where all three of the girls who shared her cabin vanished and were never seen again. Now, Camp Nightingale is going to be re-opening, and Emma is going back for answers.
Sager does a great job at depicting Emma as an unreliable narrator from the beginning. The reader knows she lies about some aspect of the case fifteen years ago, and feels tremendous guilt about it.
Emma sneaks around camp, discovering clues from fifteen years ago which could lead to answers about what happened fifteen years ago. But someone else knows that she’s lying, and knows what she did. Someone is spying on her, making her feel uneasy, and installing a camera pointed at the door of her cabin.
This book was great. I loved how it was written, since like Sager’s first book, it includes chapters of what happened in the past intermixed with what’s currently going on. My only complaints about the book include spoilers, so there’s a warning there.
My biggest problem was with the end of the novel. When the three girls go missing from Emma’s cabin (again) they’re later found in a house. We know that there have been search parties covering every acre of land, but when Emma calls out to them, they respond to her in the house. I suppose it’s possible that they hadn’t gotten to that area to search yet, but it felt like they should have been found.
In addition, at the very end we find out that one of the girls from fifteen years ago is responsible for the death of the other two, and that their bones are in an asylum that’s buried underwater. Again, this place is supposedly so secluded that no one knows it’s there, but the entire property has been searched.
Other than those two small complaints, I loved this book. The pacing was great, and I couldn’t put the book down from the halfway point until I finished it. I’m really excited to read Sager’s third book, because so far both of his novels have been really great thrillers.
-Siobhan
Ghost Shark Reads 