SYNOPSIS
The text message arrives in the small hours of the morning: I need you.
Isa drops everything, takes her baby daughter and heads straight to Salten. She spent the most significant days of her life at boarding school on the marshes there, days which still cast their shadow over her.
Isa and her three best friends used to play the Lying Game, competing to convince people of outrageous stories. Now, after seventeen years of hiding the truth, something terrible has been found on the beach. The friends' darkest secret is about to come to light...
Title: The lying game
Author: Ruth Ware
Publisher: Vintage
Publication date: March 8, 2018
REVIEW
RATING: ⭐⭐⭐
Liar, liar, pants on fire...
At this point it's not a secret (because I've repeated it ad nauseam) that "One by One" was one of my favorite reads this year. When my friend Susan came up with the idea of a "Lying Game" buddy read I said yes immediately, hoping to repeat the success I had with Ware's latest novel, but sadly I didn't.
One of the down points of not reading an author's work when it first comes out is that, instead of moving forward along the author's improvement, you go backwards, and what might have been great at the moment it's just merely ok once you know what kind of stories that author can deliver (I had the exact same feeling when I recently read Riley Sager's first book).
While "The lying game" was not a bad book at all it did not draw me in as some of her later books. I thought the premise interesting as I tend to like these boarding school stories located in isolated places, but it didn't deliver as much as it promised. The game of the title wasn't so much a game as just lying for their own survival.
I truly felt I was walking down the marsh and I think that was the book's strongest point. I can be more or less interested in her plots, but the atmosphere in Ware's stories is always on point.
The mystery itself was very slow paced and when it all came to light it didn't came as surprising as I expected. It lacked some increasing tension leading to the climax.
The characters were not the most sympathetic ones. I would have love to read a bit more about their boarding school days to truly understand why they had such a close relationship to the point of leaving everything at a moment's notice with just three words. I had some issues with their initial conflict, but I can't go into them because of spoilers. Let's just say that their actions were a bit disproportionated in light of the info they had at the moment. Also...why so many breastfeeding references?
With only "In a dark, dark wood" pending to read, "The lying game" ranks mid-bottom in my Ruth Ware ranking.
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