Lies She Told is a suspense-thriller about a bestselling author who’s trying to pen her next hit. It’s told in two separate points-of-view, Liza (the novelist), and her newest heroine, Beth. They represent “reality” and “fiction” and by the time you get to the end of the book, the line between the two has been blurred.

 

In “reality,” you have Liza who, as I said, is a bestselling author trying to pen her next greatest hit. She’s also trying to get pregnant, and is desperately willing to try anything that will give her the opportunity to finally have the baby that she’s always dreamed. She’s on an experimental fertility drug that comes with a microchip implanted into her arm, and it affects not just her hormone levels, but her memory as well. Her husband David is a lawyer who’s distraught over the disappearance of his best friend and partner, Nick.

 

In “fiction,” Beth is a wife who just caught her husband, Jake, cheating on her with another woman, when she’s out walking her newborn baby one night. Soon, she finds herself slowly building up to the moment when she snaps and commits murder. Then it’s all about the lies she tells herself knowing full well what her husband is doing when he says that he’s “working late,” and when she confronts him about his affair, he denies it and blames her postpartum depression and sleep deprivation for why she’s being “delusional.”

 

I ended up rounding Lies She Told up to 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, because I really did enjoy this story, even if the first half of the book was boring and I just did not care one iota about Liza and her pregnancy issues. The mystery surrounding Nick’s murder I was able to guess fairly early, but I can appreciate the work that the author went to try to thwart the obvious theory, and there were a couple of times when I wasn’t exactly sure who’d committed the crime. The twists and turns were well paced and the explanations believable.

 

In the second half of the book, near the end, we get more depth on Liza as a character, and everything started making sense, and, because of a past trauma, potentially developed dissociative identity disorder. It’s not blatantly stated that she had this mental illness, but the signs appeared to be there, and as far as I know, it was handled a lot better than a certain Young Adult novel that explicitly said a character had D.I.D.

 

I don’t read many books with unreliable narrators (I think this was my second, after The Girl on the Train), but I enjoyed this one. I will say, though, should you choose to read this one, be sure that you pay close attention to both halves of the story, because the line between reality and fiction get blurred as you start putting the pieces together.

 

I’ve read a few other reviews for this book and have seen others say that it’s kind of confusing in the beginning, but I didn’t have that experience; I was able to follow along right away, so maybe it’ll be just as easy for you, or maybe it won’t, who knows. It’s a fun ride, and a lot of the twists definitely took me by surprise, and by the end of it, my heart was broken for probably the wrong character(s) … but, you know, it can’t be helped sometimes.