I keep saying reading psychological thrillers will make us all lonely paranoid people. The Lies We Told is another example of why I am right!

What would you do if your boyfriend disappeared? To me, missing cases are the hardest ones as you dig into a person’s life and discover things you should not, wouldn’t want to know. Somehow, it feels as though the victim is the culprit! And the more you find out, the more you feel the need to hear any kind of explanation from the person themselves. Except you can’t. So you rely on your feelings, your friends, family, everyone around, and eventually the police. I wish it were as simple.

Camilla Way captures the helplessness and the despair behind those cases. The hours waiting, the dread, the questions. Very quickly in the story, you are thrown into a spin that never stops moving and you have no choice but to move along. The brilliantly descriptive writing puts the perfect words on how someone may feel at every stage of a disappearance. The little worry, the panicking, the flat-out awful scenarios. Then she points out, with a vivid style, every reaction triggered by details, enquiries, everything being pulled apart to find the person. I felt I was the girlfriend looking for her beau! It was both disturbing and completely amazing to see how easily the author created an empathetic connection between the reader and the main character, Clara. I felt the unease at searching through your lover’s stuff, only to discover he has been hiding things… How are you supposed to feel in this situation?

Nobody is white as a dove and The Lies We Told is a good reminder to look into your closet. And everyone else’s! Be nosy!
What starts as a missing person case quickly becomes a massive threat on everyone involved! I must admit I was not expecting the story to go this way and I purely and simply loved it! No slow-burner here! As Clara starts wondering who she has been living with, more and more things happen, and a family secret is looming over the case, making you doubt every one. I mean it. Every One.

Clara is very easy to relate to. Your usual nice and sweet girl. Not a bomb, not an ugly duckling, she is quite happy as she is and has no idea what falls on her shoulders when this mess begins. Camilla Way’s spot-on characterisation makes everyone a suspect, and every detail she offers leaves you more confused about people than the minute before. What are the parents hiding? Why is the best friend so helpful? What is wrong with the brother? Who the hell is this neighbour? Then something happens and your perspective changes. What you thought you’d spot as weird is just a human reaction. A kind gesture can only be a kind gesture. A strange look can mean a thousand things. I have another title for this story : DOUBT! Because it is all I felt throughout! Twists, turns, emotions, you get them all and the story leads you to reassess everything about someone’s life.

The Lies We Told is a breathtaking story about how lies can pollute every part of your life and destroy it.

Written by Camilla Way — Lies… a little word that can have huge consequences, as evidenced in this stand alone by the author of Watching Edie, one of our recommended reads in 2016. Clara and Luke are living a perfect life. They both work for a magazine publishing company in Soho, London, she as a writer on a financial title, he heading the design desk on an architectural quarterly. They’ve been living together for six months and they are in love and blissfully happy.

Then Luke goes missing on the day of an important job interview at work. He’s been preparing for it for weeks, has left his phone and passport behind and hasn’t taken any cash out of the bank. Where could he be? The police seem stumped too, so Clara enlists the help of their mutual friend Mac and they begin their own investigation. Big mistake, because as they dig into Luke’s comings and goings, Clara begins to realise that the man she loves isn’t as clean cut and wonderful as he appears…

This modern-day quest for the truth is interspersed with narration from the 1980s, where a beleaguered mother is being subjected to a reign of terror by her young daughter. Hannah may still be at primary school, but complaints of bullying and violence set her apart from the other youngsters. She even beheads the family budgie and sets fire to the bedroom of her babysitter’s son. It doesn’t take a hardened crime fiction reader to realise that things are not going to improve.

But what on earth could link these two, seemingly unrelated, plot strands? It’s a conundrum that will stay on the back burner for a good deal of The Lies We Told and you’ll find yourself stopping every now and then to try out possible solutions, then discard them as another juicy little snippet of information is revealed. Suffice to say that no one is quite what they might seem here…

The missing Luke is a shadowy figure, brought to life by the things that are said by his friends and family. But their descriptions clash and it’s hard to get a handle on him. Has he run off or has he been abducted? And if it’s the latter, who on earth would do such a thing? It’s a long and winding road before we are treated to any plausible answers.

There’s a picture-perfect, airbrushed quality to some of the cast of characters which can feel a tad overdone. Truth be told, Clara is naive to the point of being downright annoying and as yet another unpalatable truth comes to the surface you almost want to give her a good talking to. She’s an amalgamation of Pollyanna and Jiminy Cricket and really needs to get herself into the real world. Rant over.

Camilla Way is a dab hand at creating plausible scenarios and solid, believable dialogue, but while Watching Edie delivered a knockout punch that earned it a five-star rating on this site, The Lies We Told is more of a light sparring, handbags at dawn kind of a read. Yes, there are revelations aplenty, but they’re of the ‘oh yes, I thought so’ variety and are unlikely to surprise all that much. That said, this is a book that holds the attention while not overtaxing the brain too much. An excellent choice for the growing holiday read pile.

For more missing persons, give Paper Ghosts by Julia Haeberlin a whirl. Or grab a copy of Cara Hunter’s Close to Home.

HarperCollins
Print/Kindle/iBook
£3.99

CFL Rating: 3 Stars