Review: The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

  Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their tiny cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. The games ended when Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin in the dead of night. The last she--or anyone--saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips.

Now a rising star in the New York art scene, Emma turns her past into paintings--massive canvases filled with dark leaves and gnarled branches that cover ghostly shapes in white dresses. The paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the socialite and wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale. When Francesca implores her to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor, Emma sees an opportunity to try to find out what really happened to her friends.

Yet it's immediately clear that all is not right at Camp Nightingale. Already haunted by memories from fifteen years ago, Emma discovers a security camera pointed directly at her cabin, mounting mistrust from Francesca and, most disturbing of all, cryptic clues Vivian left behind about the camp's twisted origins. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing threats from both man and nature in the present.

And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale, the more she realizes it may come at a deadly price.

My Review: 5 Stars

I usually read YA, but I decided to venture into adult mystery/thrillers, and I will definitely be reading more of these in the near future.  I saw that this book had really good reviews, so I ended up buying it, and I definitely did not regret this purchase.  I ended up loving this book a lot.  There were several twists and reveals that I did not see coming, basically up to the last page.  Once I really got hooked in, I was invested in the story and the characters.  I also realized that it's been a long time since I wrote a review on this blog, and when I finished this book, I immediately wanted to write my thoughts into a review, so this should help get me back into reviewing again.

Emma was our narrator and I really liked her character.  It was hard to know if she was a fully reliable narrator, since she didn't necessarily fully have her grip on sanity since the incident that had happened 15 years before.  I felt bad for how much the event had scarred her and wanted her to be able to find answers to help her through her trauma.  I didn't know if I should trust everything that she knew and didn't know, but I still loved her a lot as a character.

Vivian was an interesting character.  I can't say too much about her because I don't want to spoil anything, but she was complex and her motives for things were complex.  And she was not always likable but sometimes it was easy to get wrapped up into younger Emma's narration and like her.  Natalie and Allison were much less developed than Vivian but you still got some glimpses into who they were.

Some more interesting characters were the family members of the people who run the camp.  The camp director is a woman named Franny and she has two adopted sons who also work there, Theo and Chet.  Theo is a likeable character, and very friendly and welcoming to Emma upon her return, despite the fact that he definitely has a reason to be mad at her, as she accused him of the crime many years before, and he suffered much because of this.  I mostly trusted him throughout, and I definitely didn't want him to be involved in any of the crimes.  And of course, I will not say whether or not trusting him was a good or bad idea.  The camp had this atmosphere of something secret about it that the family may or may not be hiding.  It seems like Franny may not want Emma to dig deeper into these secrets, so is she hiding something terrible?

I think my favorite characters other than Emma were Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal (probably in that order).  They were the three teenage girls who older Emma had to stay in a cabin with.  I really enjoyed seeing her form friendships with them and genuinely caring about them, despite the fact that she was originally disgruntled about having to live with the campers for 6 weeks.  And they clearly cared about her too and I think that was something that Emma needed after what she's been through.

If you like mysteries and thrillers, read this book. I was originally unsure if Riley Sager's other book would be something that I would like, but after this one, I think I may have to read it. 

Katie