I discovered Riley Sager since joining bookstagram and he has quickly become an auto buy author for me. Whenever he has a new book out I always go in as blind as I can. Having devoured his more recent books I wanted to go back and read his older ones so only had Last Time I Lied and Survive the Night to read. This book has elements of Sager but you can definitely tell it is his earlier work. I love that Sager's settings take centre stage and this one is no different as Camp Nightingale jumps off the page both in the past and present. Sager is also known for an unreliable female protagonist and Emma has the signature secrets from her past and instability. I think where this book fell down for me was it was such a slow burn and I just wasn't gripped for most of it. I was intrigued certainly which kept the pages turning but I wasn't as invested as usual with Sager's books. I did try and come up with numerous theories most of which were wrong and the ending redeemed the whole book for me but I don't know if I will remember much of it in years to come unlike some of my favourites of his. That being said even when a Sager book misses the mark it is still a solid read and maybe I just had too high expectations.

If you love your twists and turns and jaw dropping twists this is for you. The atmospheric writing made me believe I was part of the story and the setting at a creepy camp with woods and cabins was superb.

This psychological thriller kept me on the edge of my seat!

Summer camps have been the long standing setting for many iconic horrors and thrillers over the years. Camp Nightingale should join these ranks. Riley Sager sets a perfectly atmospheric and foreboding scene in the camp ground.

I, more often than not, will guess the plot in act one of a book but this book kept me on my toes.

I would definitely recommend this book!

This was a brilliant read. As soon as I started reading this book I just knew I was going to love it. Highly recommended

This was another fab YA thriller from the author who wrote 'The Final Girls' which I also thoroughly enjoyed. Lies can be easily made at the time but harder to maintain. Also, sometimes the biggest lie of all is the one we tell our self.

I loved this book. It was a bit of a slow burner but the mystery became more engrossing as the story rolled on, and wow! What an ending! When you think everything's revealed and the author does that to the reader!

There are two timelines which alternate - 13 year old Emma is on her first trip to an exclusive girls' summer camp, and because she's a late arrival is forced to bunk with three 16 year olds. All are 'rich bitches' and one is definitely the camp's queen bee who takes Emma under her wing. The other timeline is the present; it's fifteen years later and Emma now 28 is reluctantly persuaded to return as a councillor but secretly fantasizes about solving the mystery of what happened to her three cabin-mates who disappeared one night and were never seen again.

As you'd expect, suspicion is cast upon several of the other camp staff and Emma has some theories of her own. The book features mental illness in several ways - there's a story of an old asylum, and a strong sense of guilt and shame. The book is deeply atmospheric and due to Emma's fragile mental state there is an element of unreliable narrator.

I'd strongly recommend this book - but don't read the ending until you get there - it turns everything around!

Omg talk about a roller coaster read wow this book kept me on the edge of my seat threw out I just couldn't put it down this writer keeps you hooked and once your hooked your not letting go I found this book thrilling the characters were fantastic and well thought out and the little clues all the way threw keep you guessing until the end this book stays with you long after you close the book this book is well worth the read I promise you wont be disappointed

Packed with tension and atmosphere, The Last Time I Lied continues Sager's schtick (in the best way possible) of taking horror movie plots and twisting them. In this one, the very American summer camp is brought to life with dark twists and eerie scene-setting. Fun and suspensefull, a great read!

( I forgot to post my review this, and it’s nearly two years late).

I enjoyed Sager’s debut novel and I am always apprehensive reading a second book when I’m gripped by a debut. However, as a lover of thrillers (especially, those which pertain to a past event) - The Last Time I Lied, hooked me from the start. The caveat for me was the switching of past and present events, made for a slightly confusing narrative however, this plays in the trope of ‘what really happened that summer”. Well written; well paced and enjoyable.

( I forgot to post my review this, and it’s nearly two years late).

My main feeling is that the ending was mostly underwhelming until the very last second where it did shock me.

I found this to be a very middle of the road, standard thriller. The unraveling of the plot was okay, but I wasn’t dying to keep picking it up.

Thank goodness I finished this…I don't think I breathed after the first page! The suspense was like a snowball that starts the size of a cricket ball at the top of a hill and ends up a six-foot boulder at the bottom! There's tension and atmosphere from page one, then the intrigue just rolls and rolls and gets more intense, more thrilling and more twisty. What a story.

Fifteen years separates successful artist Emma Davis's two trips to Camp Nightingale. The first ended in tragedy, when her three cabin camp mates went missing. It also marked the end of the camp, owned by wealthy Francesca Harris-White. But fifteen years later, Francesca is keen to reopen the camp and restore it to its former glory, and invites Emma along, this time as art teacher. She's nervous to return…the events affected her deeply for many years, but it's an opportunity to face those demons and perhaps find out what really happened to her friends.

I was slightly knocked off my smug perch with this one. I usually guess the who did it (not necessarily what or why), somewhere between 60-80% into a thriller. Not with this one. I bounced between a few possibles, but I was totally unprepared for the reveal. Not only that, we get just one more brilliant final twist.

Excellent book. My 'read more of' list isn't long. Exclusive admission only. But Sager has earned himself a well-deserved place.

Story started off very slowly. Took me a while to get into it, but once I did I was hooked. This is my first book with this author but I am going to look up Final Girls as most people seem to think is a better book.

Its not very often I do this but before writing this review I went back to my review of his previous novel. To see how I felt about that one.

To be honest. I found this one a little difficult to get in to. The reason I've given it 3 stars is because it took me a while to really get into this. It wasn't until I got to just after halfway when the twists and turns started coming in thick and fast.

"All hours wound, the last one kills."

I liked how Emma used her painting as a way of coping with the girls death. I also love that she went back to the place that haunts her the most. She was so brave to face her demons. I find these books the hardest to write as I never want to give something away through my reviews as I hate spoilers.

I found Franny, Theo, Lottie and Becca to be the most complex characters. However most of the characters in the book had so many layers to them and thats what made this book so interesting.

Unfortunately I read this book a while ago and seem to have missed it when writing reviews. - sadly I cant remember enough detail to give a full review.
However, thanks to NetGalley for the ARC :-)

Okay, okay, I know. I must be one of the very last people to read this book. I get it. I was slow on the uptake. It’s a book that’s been sitting on my TBR pile for a while now and I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to get to it. But here I am, with a review of this very hyped up crime thriller.

Let me start by saying this: I’m feeling frustrated. What’s wrong with me? Why am I being let down by these hyped-up books that others have loved? What are they seeing that I’m not seeing?

Here’s what I think. First off, I just don’t think I was the right fit for this book. I seem to have developed a dislike for books that are set in, at, or around American style “camps”, like summer camps, wilderness camps, and so on. I suppose the problem exists because I’m not American and so I’ve never been exposed to the concept of “camps”, being summer holiday get-aways for boys and girls that could last anywhere between 3 – 6 weeks. This might be one of the reasons why I don’t feel attached to books that take place while the characters are “at camp”. I would never have wanted to go away to “camp” and I can’t really see the attraction.

Secondly, I find the concept of the teenage flirtation that happens with the hottest boy at camp but goes nowhere thereafter, and which boy then returns as man when all the characters are adults and stirs up longings in the now adult female, rather testing. Theo, the boy that young Emma had a crush on all those years ago, now arrives back at camp as an adult. Emma happens to be back there as well, having taken up the position of art teacher. He’s now a doctor who’s spreading his goodwill around the world and who has just returned from working in Africa for Doctors Without Borders. He’s apparently even more good-looking than he ever was, he’s a doctor, he’s noble, and of course he’s single! Um, please, not likely. I never find that sort plot strand very believable. And of course, even though Emma accused him of being involved in the murders of her friends at the camp 15 years ago, he’s totally forgiven her for these atrocious allegations…so much so that he seems quite taken with her. *Eye-roll*

The third issue that I had is that this book felt very YA to me, and I seriously dislike YA fiction.

But okay, those are a few of my personal issues and I’m perfectly prepared to admit that they probably won’t apply to many other people. I also accept that I’ve now made it sound like I seriously disliked this book, so let me also talk about what I did like, and what I think you may like:
• The story is told from alternating timelines - the present day, and then also 15 years earlier, during Emma's first stay at Camp Nightingale. Having said this however, most of the story is told in the present day but it’s actually the past unsolved crime that’s more interesting.
• The story was very atmospheric, and the author did a good job of creating a creepy mood.
• I enjoyed the references made throughout the book to the game “two truths and a lie”. This brought a somewhat fun aspect to the story and I could absolutely picture young teenagers playing a game like this.
• The concept of having an old mystery that hadn’t been solved as one of the main plot lines was entertaining and I enjoyed that.
• The second half of this book had a few good twists and turns, some of which I had to listen to a couple of times to make sure that I had fully understood them. I love it when that happens.

Overall, this wasn’t a bad book, and many people have absolutely loved it. I did find the second half of the book somewhat better and more engrossing than the first half and this went some way to redeeming the story for me. And I must say, I did love the ending!

Camp Nightingale, 15 years ago.

It's Emma's first time at camp and she is put in cabin Dogwood with 3 girls, who are all older than her, who she becomes friends with and they teach her the game 'Two Truths and a Lie' and help her settle in. One night the three girls, Vivian, Natalie and Allison, all leave the cabin never to be seen again.

Present Day.

Emma is now an artist, painting pictures that always revolve around woods and figures running away, still plagued by what happened that summer and wondering if there was anything she could've done to change what happened.

She receives a message from the owner of the camp saying it's going to be re-opened and she is asked to go as the art teacher, after thinking about it for a while she decides to say yes because she wants to nose around to try and solve the mystery.

Does she solve it? Do things go smoothly while she's there? Is she crazy? Is everyone else crazy? Why's that camera up there? Why are all these trees in the woods? Why so many questions? Am I the crazy one? All these questions and more will have answers by the time you've finished this book! (except the one about me, I think we all know by now the answer to THAT particular question).

I love books set in secluded places, stories set in camps always remind me of the Friday the 13th series (Love Jason) and because I've never been to one I have to just imagine that they're all spooky and creepy as fuck and that Jason will pop up at some point to kill all the campers. Fun times!

Riley Sager has fast become one of my go to authors and I will pick up all he writes because they're gonna be creepy and they're going to keep me hooked.

Highly recommended to all!!

*Huge thanks to Riley Sager, Penguin Random House UK, Ebury Publishing and NetGalley for this copy which I chose to read and all opinions are my own*

Well written and thoroughly entertaining. Loved the way the story flicked back and forth between past and present to gain an understanding of what really happened to Emma when she went to camp for the first time.!

You know that feeling when you’re really torn about a book? That’s how I feel about Last Time I Lied right now.

I previously read Sager’s Final Girls and really enjoyed it – I loved how he took a horror trope and turned it into a thriller – so when I learned he was doing something similar with his second book, this time set at a summer camp, I knew I had to try it.

I don’t read thrillers very often because I’m a historical and fantasy fiction girl at heart, but I usually enjoy them when I read them, and horror is a genre I’m trying to get into more. I’m a big wuss, though, and my imagination is far too vivid for me to read and watch horror regularly. Even true crime podcasts freak me out if I listen to them in big chunks.

I’m mainly saying this because I’m not as familiar with the tropes that might appear in thrillers as I am with tropes from the fiction I regularly read, so keep that in mind if you’re someone who reads a lot of thrillers because I’m probably not the best person to tell you whether or not you’ll guess what happens in this novel.

Emma is an artist in New York City who’s given the opportunity to work as an art teacher at a summer camp that’s reopening 15 years after it closed amidst a scandal, when three of the campers went missing and were never seen again. Emma was the fourth girl in that cabin, and she has never gotten over the girls’ disappearance – possibly because she feels as though she might have had a hand in it.

I’m the kind of reader who loves characters. Characters make a book for me, and that’s why this novel has me so torn because I didn’t like any of the characters – and I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to like them, and I don’t think we need to like characters to be interested in them – but the plot I liked a lot. I did not see the end of this novel coming, and it’s that reason alone that’s left me giving Last Time I Lied three stars instead of two.

This is a very well-plotted novel, and I really admired how various plot points came together, but the characters were a huge fail for me.

Emma is such a non-character. Other than the things we learn to move the plot along, I don’t think we really get to know her at all and that’s a real shame – an unreliable narrator can be so fun in a thriller, but I just didn’t care about Emma at all and that made it difficult to root for her. Her ‘big secret’ surrounding her guilt is kind of lame, and I found it strange that 15 years since the disappearance of the girls, other people were still holding things that Emma said when she was 13 – a child – against her. The suspicions she had as a child were perfectly valid.

I also wasn’t that keen on how Sager wrote women in this novel. I’m not saying women need to be perfect – the point of feminism is that we aren’t; we’re people with all the foibles natural to human beings – but there was a lot of that ‘teenage girls are mean’ crap that I’m not a fan of. It all felt a little too ‘Regina George does summer camp’ for me to believe it, which was a shame.

Ultimately I’d recommend this novel if you’re prepared to be more invested in the plot than the characters, but if you’re in the mood for a thriller, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t reach for thrillers often, this is a fun one that will keep you guessing!

I adored The Final Girls by Riley Sager so was absolutely thrilled to get an ARC of Last Time I Lied. But I was also worried!! Would the dreaded “second novel syndrome” strike? Could this book live up to my expectations after the brilliance of The Final Girls? Not only did it smash my expectations to smithereens, I actually think it now has the edge over his debut novel!!

Now all the best US teen horror movies are set around summer camps as they are the perfect setting with the lakes, woods and creepy cabins providing lots of scope for shocks and scary moments! But with Last Time I Lied, there was more of a sinister, undercurrent and a wonderfully atmospheric feel to the narrative that owes a lot to one of my favourite books Picnic at Hanging Rock and the author does acknowledge that he was inspired by that book/film for his starting point for this novel. The disappearance of three girls from Camp Nightingale is a mystery that has remained unsolved for 15 years but now their cabin buddy Emma has been invited back for the grand reopening and the secrets of the past threaten to return with a vengeance. Emma comes across as an unreliable narrator, she has had mental health problems in the past, and being back in the place where her friends vanished without a trace seems to set her back once more. The game they played all those years ago of Two Truths and a Lie, becomes central to the plot when Emma once again plays it with three new girls that she is once again sharing her cabin with. And the scene of those past events may now be ready to give up its secrets.

To begin with I thought that Last Time I Lied was a bit of a slower burner and wasn’t sure where it was going or why. But this gives the author plenty of time to gradually increase the tension and sprinkle the narrative liberally with clues and red herrings, some I spotted and others that came as a huge surprise! And as the creases of the map he has perfectly plotted for his readers start to iron out, I became completely engrossed and bewitched by this beguiling protagonist and the secrets she had been holding within for so many years. There was an unexpected understanding of all the intricacies and angst of teenage girls, who have all the feelings of adult women but with no experience to interpret and act upon them without the guidance they so desperately need but stubbornly eschew.

And let’s talk about that epilogue!!!!! Actually, I CAN’T!!! But I have to tell you that it absolutely blew me away!! You just HAVE to read it for yourself to find out why! If you enjoyed The Final Girls then I guarantee you will love this book just as much, if not more. I did and once again Riley Sager will be on my Best Books of the year list!

Very highly recommended by me!

I wasn't a huge fan of Riley Sager's first book but wanted to give the author another go.
Surprisingly I thoroughly enjoyed this read. Following one point of view and flipping between timelines, this was a great read full of mystery and intrigue.
It was compelling and easy to follow with long-standing family dramas, isolated cabins, missing teenagers and old wounds.
It is definitely worth a read.