Review of The Lie by C.L. Taylor

Title/Author: The Lie by C.L. Taylor
Publisher/Date published: HarperCollins, April 23rd 2015
How I got this book: received it from the publisher through NetGalley
Buy this book at: The Book Depository

Goodreads summary: Best friends are there for each other through thick and thin. You trust them with your life. At least that’s what Emma, Daisy, Leanne and Al think. But all that changes when they embark on a trip of a lifetime together. When they return home, only two of them are left alive and the group has been torn apart by lies and deception.

Many years later, when the dust has settled and life has moved on, one girl receives a threatening letter. Someone knows the truth about what happened on that holiday and will stop at nothing to expose it...

OMG, this book was SCARY! AND CRAZY! SO much crazy! I cannot even.

I'm fascinated by cults/sects/whatever you want to call them that basically is a group of people who do their own thing and some of them do batcrap crazy things. Not all obviously, but those are the ones you hear about on the news or that make the best stories. Obviously. I mean, there's all this taboo about them and well, I just always wonder where this view of the world that they had went wrong. I mean, they probably started out wanting to do good and live a better life, right? But hearing about how things go wrong in such a group always gives me the creeps and also makes me curious. This book was sorta like watching a trainwreck happen, you know you shouldn't be this fascinated by it, but you can't look away.

Anyway. Our main character Emma was ok, she's flawed and probably because of this, I could relate to her. I could see how she got into this mess and how when you're in the middle of something like this, you can't immediately see what you should do about it. Everything was spinning out of control for her fast and I don't know how I would have handled that. I mean, you think you're going on the holiday of a lifetime with your friends and then you end up in the middle of something that ends with the death of two of said friends? Wow. That is more than you should have to handle.

I could also relate to her friend situation: in their group of four, Emma is only really friends with Daisy and Al, and she and Leanne tolerate each other for the sake of the other two, but aren't really friends. In the end, I'm not sure any of them were really friends, except for Emma and Al. It pains me to say that Daisy isn't a very nice person. She's petty and jealous and has pulled stuff that a true friend wouldn't in my opinion. And Leanne is just a crazy bitch. I'm sorry, I can't make it any prettier than it is, I truly despised her, and it got worse the further I got into the novel.

But OMG, this situation they end up in and the people! It changes all of the four girls and they really aren't all that safe there. I was reading it and going:

But more like EVERYBODY BE CRAZY!

So The Lie switches back and forth between present time, which is 5 years after the events on holiday and the actual happenings on said holiday and I liked it, but at the same time I wished someone would just hurry up and tell me what happened because the suspense!! Which means it's actually pretty well done by the author because holy wow, it was a 400 page novel with teeny tiny script on my e-reader and I still REALLY wanted to keep reading it.

If you're looking for a read that is scary and crazy and which will keep you enticed for the whole of it, The Lie is definitely for you.

My rating: 4 stars