Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Riley Sager's The Last Time I Lied is a thriller published in 2018 and it reminded me of some teenage drama B-movies that came out in the 80s and 90s where particularly stupid young adults make bad decisions and spend the rest of their lives paying the price. In this story, a rich girls' summer camp reopens 15 years after it was closed due to the unsolved disappearances of three prominent teenage girls. Heroine Emma stayed in the same cabin as the older, lost girls. Now a painter, Emma suffers survivor's guilt, painting the three missing girls over and over in her acclaimed art. When the owner of the camp decides to reopen despite the notoriety of Camp Nightingale, she invites Emma to teach painting during the summer session. Emma knows she needs to deal with the past and this seems like the way to do it. Besides, she's determined to find out the truth of what happened a decade and a half ago--even if it means potentially stirring up a hornet's nest and setting in motion a repeat of the past. 

One of the things I'm always lured into Sager's stories with is the promise of potential supernatural explanations for unsolved mysteries. In this story, the ghost of one of the missing girls seems to be haunting Emma's consciousness--or is she physically haunting her? Not knowing kept me reading. I loved the allegory of Emma painting the three girls into all of her art and then covering them up under forest scenes of paint. Emma can't get past this in her painting let alone her life until the mystery is finally solved. 

Sager is a solid writer and always includes well developed characters that you root for even as you doubt them and their true motives. This plot was filled with a large amount of red herrings and suspects along with multilayered subplots and suspense galore. While a lot of the reviews I read about the thriller talked about a shocking twist at the end, I for one anticipated something just like this (which could just mean I'm a writer as well as a reader). For that reason, to me it simply felt well done and perfectly executed, not particularly surprising. The story would have felt incomplete without that precise denouement. 

My only real complaint is a pretty mild one that I've spoken of in at least one of my previous reviews for this author's books. The tale just dragged on and on. In part, I admit I don't feel any great love for summer camps, having never gone to one nor ever really wanted to. I felt there were too many characters, too many mysteries to solve, too many twists and turns. As I've alluded to before with Sager, I felt the book was unnecessarily complicated, something others might consider a plus, but which made the off-shot tangents in the plot a burden for me to get through. I'm not sure it needed such a large cast of characters either. I had a little bit of trouble keeping track of who was who and how they all fit in the story--past and present. 

Overall, though, The Last Time I Lied is another solid brainteaser, and Sager has convinced me to put him on my "read everything by this author" list. Stay tuned. I expect I'll be reviewing more of his books in the future. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/