The Last Time I Lied
Author: Riley Sager
Publication Date: July 3rd, 2018
Publisher: Dutton
Riley Sager’s debut novel Final Girls chilled me to the bone and The Last Time I Lied certainly did the same! It is about an artist named Emma who is obsessed with finding out what happened to three of her friends who vanished without a trace from the summer camp she was attending when she was only thirteen. When adult Emma is invited back to Camp Nightingale to teach painting, she decides to accept, hoping to find out the truth about what happened to the girls so many years ago.
The book alternates between the present day and the past when Emma was still a camper. The characters are well defined and developed and the story is super spooky with great atmosphere and imagery. I can easily see how Sager was inspired by Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of my all-time favourite films. The Last Time I Lied is a novel to pick up and devour in one sitting. I couldn’t wait to find out what had happened to the missing girls and if Emma would make it to the end unscathed!
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada, Penguin Random House US and Goodreads for the copies provided for review.
From the publisher:
In the latest thriller from the bestselling author of Final Girls, a young woman returns to her childhood summer camp to uncover the truth about a tragedy that happened there fifteen years ago.
Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. But the games ended the night Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin into the darkness. 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. When the paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale, she implores Emma to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor. Seeing an opportunity to find out what really happened to her friends all those years ago, Emma agrees.
Familiar faces, unchanged cabins, and the same dark lake haunt Nightingale, even though the camp is opening its doors for the first time since the disappearances. Emma is even assigned to the same cabin she slept in as a teenager, but soon discovers a security camera--the only one on the property--pointed directly at its door. Then cryptic clues that Vivian left behind about the camp's twisted origins begin surfacing. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing mysterious threats in the present. And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale and what really happened to those girls, the more she realizes that closure could come at a deadly price.
You can read my original Isabella's Reading Corner post on The Last Time I Lied here and author Riley Sager's guest post here.
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