I recently read “This is How I Lied” by Heather Gudenkauf for The Investigators Book Group with Wendy Kendall and Valerie Brooks on Facebook for a discussion late last month.
Life intervened for me, necessitating a cross country road trip for a family emergency, so I didn’t release my review in time for the discussion or to even attend the book group. This book, however, is worthy of a review, so I am posting that now.
Heather Gudenkauf is an Edgar Award nominated, New York Times, and USA Today bestselling author. She hails from the Midwest. Having spent over twenty years of my life there, I could appreciate the small town Midwest setting that she chose for this thriller. She captured the details that put me right back in the heart of the Iowa countryside, but she added a dollop of sinister which gave me the shivers.
Maggie Kennedy-O’ Keefe is a police officer investigating a cold case. She’s eight months pregnant, so the slower pace of a cold case makes sense. What makes this case stand out, however, is that it’s the cold case that her father couldn’t solve twenty-five years before when he was in charge of it. And the fact that the murder victim was Maggie’s best friend at age fifteen, neighbor Eve Knox. Eve’s murder is the most impactful event of Maggie’s life.
Maggie will have to face the past in ways she never has before to root out the truth in this case. Maggie investigates Eve’s boyfriend, Nick, who is suspected of abusing Eve, and her sister Nola who is suspected of abusing animals as a youngster, despite now practicing as a veterinarian as an adult. As Maggie pursues the case, disturbing threats are made against her and her family that are deeply personal.
This novel offers three points of view: Maggie, Eve, the murder victim, and Nola. In Eve’s perspective we go back in time and read about her final day. As we do, we discover that just about everyone had a reason to hurt or kill Eve, which complicates the mystery further. The twists in this story keep coming all the way to the end. In Nola’s perspective we learn more backstory and try get inside her head to discover if this troubled girl actually killed her sister. And finally, in Maggie’s perspective, we watch her uncover truths she wasn’t aware of and face truths she wanted to forget. In the end she is forced to make a decision that could rock her future.
I could not put this book down. It was a puzzle that I examined from all sides as the stories in the past and the present played out. Reading about Eve’s last day was like watching an innocent animal stumble toward an unavoidable trap. Nola seemed like the obvious suspect some of the time and a loyal kid sister at other times. It was hard to know what to believe. And with the threats against Maggie, the suspense kept building.
If you enjoy a thriller that digs into small town secrets, or a puzzle that will niggle at your mind when you put the book down – if you can put the book down – read this one. I doubt you’ll figure it out until the heart pounding finish.
Read on if you want some of my further thoughts on the book and you don’t mind a slight spoiler alert – don’t worry – I don’t give away the killer. I just focus on a pet peeve of mine in thriller novels that this novel uses to ratchet up the surprise factor.
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I won’t give away too much, but this book falls into a category that is becoming more common. The unreliable or holdout narrator. Maggie, the book’s ultimate main character, doesn’t tell you everything she knows about what happened in the past until half way through the book.
Personally, I find it challenging to solve a mystery when my first person point of view main character doesn’t tell me what she knows when she knows it. My opinion? If I am inside her head, I should know what she knows. She knew it on page one. I should find out in the early pages and I don’t.
As noted, though, it’s a common plot device lately, and having read several books like this recently, I will now suspect an unreliable and/or holdout narrator is possible until a reveal does or does not happen. Another reason I am not crazy about this plot device is that it seems like an artificial twist in the story, and not a natural one, since our main character knows the twist on page one. But it’s a trendy device right now, and many authors are using it to excellent effect with bombshell surprises.
I will say, it didn’t entirely ruin the book for me, and I am still glad I read it because it was engrossing. The characters were fascinating and the puzzle was irresistible, but it doesn’t put me on a fair footing for solving the case with Maggie when she holds out on me. And it irritates me when authors don’t play fair.
On the other hand, the title, “This is How I Lied,” does hint that a main character is lying – one who writes in the first person perhaps? Maggie is the only character written in first person, so you might have excellent reason to suspect the unreliable/holdout narrator trope is coming. With that explicit warning on the cover, I think even I can give Gudenkauf a pass.
This dislike of the unreliable/holdout narrator is a personal preference or mine, so it may not be a problem for many readers. If it isn’t going to bother you, I definitely recommend getting this book.
