Review: The Lies We Tell by Meg Carter

Can we ever escape our past?
The last time Katy saw Jude was on a school trip, when Jude was attacked by a stranger and Katy ran away. Twenty years later, Jude is back, and her reappearance coincides with a series of unsettling incidents: a stranger appears in the downstairs flat; one night Katy’s house is vandalised; her mother is mugged and her home ransacked. And Jude seems to know an uncomfortable amount about Katy’s current life...
For fans of Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, THE LIES WE TELL is an addictive, complex and completely gripping psychological thriller in which present and past intertwine to devastating effect. Forced to revisit the same rocky waters of friendship and power they inhabited when they were fifteen, as the story reaches its explosive climax, Jude and Katy realise that when it comes to memory, truth and family – nothing and no-one are what they seem.

Shona's review 2 of 5 stars

The cover and blurb for this book really grabbed my attention and I was very keen to slip between its pages. This book promised to be gripping thriller. The reality was somewhat different for me.

One of the things I really like about this book is the way the story unfolds, the story is told from two points in time, the here and now and back in Katy and Jude's teenage years when they first meet and become friends. However, with the way some of these chapters were laid it, made the story feels very disjointed. At one point Katy answers the phone and I assumed I knew who it was, but 2 chapters later we find it was actually someone else.. 

This book is heavily descriptive. very heavily descriptive. At certain points there was so much descriptive text that I actually forgot what the conversation was about and would have to skip back many, many pages to the last piece of dialogue just to jog my memory of what was being said.

The story itself was certainly intriguing, there's no way I could have walked away from this book without finding out the full story... but overall I felt the story took too long to unfold and some parts were so obvious I wondered why Carter took so long to reveal them.