The Lying Game, Ruth Ware. Kindle.

Engaging, cleverly misleading, scenic.

This thriller was my first Ruth Ware novel, and I am happy I gave this author a try. I’d been in a bit of a book drought after reading a long epic novel and was looking for something brief and entertaining. Ware’s story of four women entangled in a tragic secret from their school days perfectly fit the bill. I enjoyed the narrative perspective of Isa Wilde, who had attended Salten, a boarding school in the lush, eponymous English seaside town, as a lonely 15-year-old when her father was too distraught by her mother’s terminal illness to care for her and her brother. Isa befriends fellow outcasts Fatima, Thea, and Kate, and the latter two indoctrinate the former in their exclusive Lying Game. They spend their collective 15th year alienating themselves from fellow students and concocting falsehoods for their own entertainment. Now 17 years later, they reunite when the truth about their most deadly lie threatens to be exposed.

Ware kept me guessing throughout most of this story; just when I thought I had the secret solved, she’d throw in a cleverly crafted curveball to shake things up. However, there were some glaring issues and inconsistencies in the secret the girls shared that I would expect such educated women (Isa, a lawyer, and Fatima, a doctor, after all) to be suspicious of far sooner than they were. I also thought that some secondary characters were too vaguely drawn—perhaps intentionally so—for the important roles they would end up playing in the story’s resolution. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a quick read or interested in visiting the marshy coasts of England; the scenery Ware describes is the best unnamed character in the book.

Favorite Quotation: “A wall, after all, isn’t just about keeping others out. It can also be for trapping people inside.”