Irritated that his extramarital affair come to an end against his will, William Wooler arrives a bit earlier home, only to find out his 9-year old daughter Avery is unexpectedly at home. They do have an argument and shortly after, the girl went missing. The police is starting an investigation and as the proceedings advance, dark secrets are about to surge.
Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena is an intricated maze of betrayal and lies, rolling from one page to another as a snowball threatening to destroy everything in its way. Everyone ends up by suspecting everyone else, but there is at least one person who knows the truth.
Lapena is inducing a feeling of emergency and fear, particularly by building the story around the disappearing of a child, which is a highly sensitive topic. The reader is more empathic and on alert in such cases, and following the threads of the story and the lies makes the experience even more dramatic. Narrowing the options to the neighbourhood amplifies the claustrophobic feeling of running through a labyrinth of smoked mirrors.
My only regret is that somehow, on the way to finding the truth, one may completely forget about the characters and their depth, as what they are doing and what they are hiding feels more relevant than their complexity.
For readers of domestic suspense, Everyone Here is Lying is a good challenge. Personally, I tried every chapter at a time to guess the ending, but in the end I was far from the truth. It´s a mind game and a challenge that may not put the reader in the most comfortable situation, nevertheless a real pleasure for the thriller-hungry mind.
Rating: 4 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own
Thanks for the blog tour support x
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