Review – The Lies You Told by Harriet Tyce

Posted December 30, 2020 by Carole in 2020 New Release Challenge, Book Reviews / 6 Comments

The Lies You Told by Harriet Tyce
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publication Date: December 1, 2020
Date Read: December 23, 2020
Length: 384 pages
Source: Publisher
★★★★☆

From the acclaimed author of Blood Orange, a dark new psychological thriller about the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect family — and the perfect murder.

In the playground it’s the law of the jungle

But at the school gate, there are no rules at all…

When Sadie Roper moves back to London, she’s determined to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. First, she needs to get her daughter settled into a new school-one of the most exclusive in the city. Next, she’s going to get back the high-flying criminal barrister career she sacrificed for marriage ten years earlier. But nothing goes quite as planned. The school is not very welcoming newcomers, her daughter hasn’t made any friends yet and the other mothers are as fiercely competitive as their children. Sadie immediately finds herself on the outside as she navigates the fraught politics of the school gate.

But the tide starts to turn as Sadie begins to work on a scandalous, high-profile case that’s the perfect opportunity to prove herself again, even though a dangerous flirtation threatens to cloud her professional judgment. And when Liza, queen of the school moms, befriends Sadie, she draws her into the heart of the world from which she was previously excluded. Soon Sadie and her family start to thrive, but does this close new friendship prevent her from seeing the truth? Sadie may be keeping her friends close, but what she doesn’t know is that her enemies are closer still…

Dark, addictive and compelling, The Lies You Told is a compulsive psychological thriller from a master storyteller.

 My Review

This was good!  I decided to read this book on a bit of a whim.  I hadn’t heard anything about the book or the author but I am always ready to give a thriller a try and I liked the sound of this one.  Let me tell you that once I really got into the book, I was hooked and couldn’t wait to find out what was really going on.   This was definitely an entertaining read.

Sadie has split from her husband and is back in London living in the home she grew up in.  She did not have a good relationship with her mother, or really any relationship at all in more recent years, but her mother has left her the house under one condition.  In order to stay in the home, Sadie’s daughter, Robin, must attend the elite school that Sadie attended as a child.  Robin is a great student but Sadie and Robin don’t feel welcome at the school and the other mothers seem hostile at times.  Eventually, everything changes and Sadie and Robin are suddenly part of the inner circle but should they trust anyone?  On top of it all, Sadie is working a very complex case as a barrister which only adds to the stress of her situation.
I had no idea who I should trust in this book.  The clique of mothers at the school was just horrible and I couldn’t understand why they were so unwelcoming towards both Sadie and Robin.  The competitive attitude was rather extreme and there were questions about what kinds of things had happened to other students.  I wanted to know what was going on with the case Sadie was working on and what was causing her marriage to fall apart.  
I thought that the book was very well written.  There are some short chapters spread throughout the book that show the reader a glimpse of the future so it quickly became apparent that things would fall apart before everything was over.  There were so many things going on and I liked the way that we learn things at a perfect pace to keep the interest level high on every topic.  This was one of those books that I found really hard to put down since it kept me guessing until the very end.
I would recommend this book to others.  I thought that this was a very well-crafted thriller that had plenty of twists and turns that kept me guessing until the very end.  I would definitely read more of this author’s work in the future.


I received a copy of this book from Grand Central Publishing.

About the Author

Harriet Tyce grew up in Edinburgh and studied English at Oxford University before doing a law conversion course at City University. She practiced as a criminal barrister for nearly a decade. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She lives in north London.

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6 responses to “Review – The Lies You Told by Harriet Tyce”

  4. Literary Feline

    I haven't been able to read thrillers this year (I managed one, but that was it). This does sound really good though and I'll keep it in mind for when I'm ready to dive back into that subgenre.