The next thrilling suspense featuring Will Trent and Sara Linton from Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Girls and After That Night!
Everyone here is a liar, but only one of us is a killer…
A secluded cabin retreat
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-the-grid mountaintop property, it's the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night.
A murderer in their midst
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….Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves.
Who killed Mercy McAlpine?
It soon becomes clear that normal rules don't apply at McAlpine Lodge, and Will and Sara are going to have to watch their step at every turn. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock…
Title : This Is Why We Lied
Author : Karin Slaughter
Series : Will Trent (book twelve)
Format : eBook (overdrive)
Page Count : 464
Genre : thriller / mystery
Publisher : William Morrow
Release Date : August 20, 2024
Reviewer : Hollis
Rating : ★ ★ ★ .5
Hollis' 3.5 star review
As always, a new Slaughter -- and particularly a new Will Trent -- ends up high on my anticipated list for the year. So it was no surprise I stalked Libby until this popped up and immediately dove in.. only to take an almost two week hiatus because l i f e. Womp womp. All that to say, I don't think that break impacted my reading experience because I think I had only managed a few chapters and didn't get all that far into things. But they had certainly left an impression and made it easy to slip back into the plot.
That said, I think despite the many potential suspects -- and all the delightful red herrings, which as always were well done -- this wasn't an overall interesting mystery. There is a sense of locked room-ness to it all because of the seclusion as, surprise!, Will and Sarah are on their honeymoon and for these characters (well, singular) that meant a remote mostly isolated retreat to a set of cabins for nature shenanigans; but sadly, despite their attempt at limiting the amount of work they were bringing with them on this happiest of occasions, murder does not take vacation. And suddenly Will and Sarah have to figure out who of the many (many!) people who seemed to have it out for Mercy McAlpine, the majority of whom were her own family, who helped to run the retreat with her, was the one to kill her.
Adding to the complications is someone from Will's past who has found himself intricately intertwined in both this family and the investigation and who is held up as a mirror to, in some ways, compare the two. Show how their childhoods could have defined them, and did, but how it didn't have to dictate their futures or how they treated others. I'm not sure if this revelation ends up bringing Will any joy, particularly with some of the dialogue near the end, but in some ways I think it does provide some.. not closure but acceptance.
As with any Slaughter, there are a multitude of topics and discussions and events that can be hard to read about, so triggers abound! But you wouldn't be this far into this series (spin-off series, at that) if you didn't know that going in.
While not my favourite, isn't certainly not the first to hit that sweet spot and I'm sure it won't be the last. And it certainly won't stop me from waiting (im)patiently for the next.
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