Reviews with content warning for Addiction - This is Why We Lied

⚠️ CW: murder, child abuse, domestic abuse, rape, paedophilia and mentions of drug abuse and addiction ⚠️ If you want a book that will make you question every single character multiple times then this one is for you! For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-grid mountaintop property, it’s the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night. Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock. This book had me absolutely hooked from the very beginning and even when I did put it down I was still thinking of the plot and the characters and trying to figure out who the murderer was. Karin Slaughter is a new author to me, and this is only the second book I've read by her, but she's quickly becoming a fast favourite! Especially with her Will Trent series as I love that the books can be read as a series or easily picked up as standalones with no issues. The only reason I dropped this down a star was because of the mass amount of characters, and in parts it did feel a bit overwhelming trying to remember everything and everyone. Overall, I highly recommend this book and can't wait to read more by this author.

Content Warnings

mizuhanome's review against another edition

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4.0

I'm writing this immediately after finishing. So maybe it's going to be a bit biased because I still feel completely devastated by that ending

This is Why We Lied is a Good Book. It's a Solid Book. It's truly a 4 star book ...for me, personally. It seems like a lot of people really love this book, and I think a part of that is also part of why it didn't fully click for me, which is the fact that this is book 12 in a series. Book 12?!?!?!?

The beginning of this book is really... I'm not sure if "slow" is the right term so much as, it goes over a lot of details that I struggle to care about. The thing is like... I'm sure this book, seeing the main leads go on their honeymoon, is very very satisfying for people who have read the whole series and watched them develop. It just... focuses a lot, too much for my tastes, on "isn't it so nice that these characters you may not know anything about are in love". It's very very very overly sappy and fanservicey before we get into the meat of things. That's pretty minor, though, but it drags at the start... Another thing is that this books writing style really didn't stand out to me one bit, which disappointed me and probably made it a bit hard to feel motivated to read it, but that's solidly personal preference.

It's good, though. I'm a sucker for closed area murder mysteries, I'm a sucker for family drama, all the good things in the synopsis that made me pick up the book were very very much there. I liked the characters a lot overall, in spite of the fact I didn't have a preconceived attachment to them. Although I do kind of agree that the culprit is easy to guess early on, it leads you down a lot of different pathways. Not in a "purposefully twisty to get a shock reaction" way, but genuinely unraveling a complex mystery, one completely mundane and grounded but horrifying and interesting.

That's the thing, though... This book is not for the faint of heart. God. Not even a little. It's INSANELY dark, consistently, throughout the entire book. I mean... the whole book centers around the life of a woman who went through almost every type of abuse imaginable, who truly had no one she could trust to not hurt her, no one she could rely on. (That's another thing I like, as well, getting the victim's POV and fully fleshing her out...) And just when you think you've heard the worst of it, it gets even worse. It's not shock value. Most of it is talked about in past tense, and when it is depicted, it only serves to showcase the true severity of the situation, the deep pain that it causes the victim. It felt very true to the reality of extreme familial abuse. It's just really that horrifying. The final reveal made me nauseous, and then start crying, and there's almost nothing that makes me uncomfortable in written text but it was just so harrowing, so real that I couldn't help but feel ruined by it.

So, like... Do I recommend this book? ...I recommend a good read-through of the content warnings first. And then, yeah.

Content Warnings

hnmeister's review against another edition

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dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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pterodog's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I enjoyed this installment much more than the previous one, probably because the story felt a bit more grounded in reality to me. It was sufficiently mysterious to keep me engaged and guessing up until the last few pages, and I did enjoy trying to figure out the culprit while I read.

I'm not sure why everyone forgot that Mercy couldn't have been speaking to Dave when she made that final phone call, but I guess the implication was that she was meant to be speaking to Cecil? This did confuse me a little, which is a shame as otherwise the last part of the story would probably have been less confusing.

I did appreciate Will's character development, and his choice

not to help Dave in the final page of the book. Otherwise, I think it would have felt a little repetitive for me. There's only so many times I can read Will putting his life and his relationship with Sara on the line before I start thinking about this being a Jeffery situation again.

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evoss14's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I'm a big fan of Karin Slaughter and the Will Trent series. This one has an Agatha Christie "locked room" motif with a series of plot twists that you won't see coming!!

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