Hot off the heels of reading Final Girls by Riley Sager, I decided to read his next novel, The Last Time I Lied. Similar in cadence and told again from the female perspective, I really enjoyed this work, too!
The book follows Emma Davis, painter, and former camper at Camp Nightingale, which holds more haunting than fond memories for her. Told in alternating chapters from present day, where she’s asked to return to Camp Nightingale as a counselor, and from fifteen years ago when her friends/cabin-mates disappeared. You feel for her, but then she lets you know she’s been holding onto some lies for that time, along with a stint in a psychiatric hospital from the events’ traumas.
Returning to the camp, Emma wants “closure,” but more than that she wants to find out what happened to the girls: Natalie, Allison, and ringleader, Vivian. Her plans are complicated when a lot of familiar faces return to camp, too, including her crush, Theo, the son of Camp Nightingale’s owner, Franny, whom she blamed for the disappearance of the girls. After finding some clues, Emma thinks she’s close to nailing down something really important, but someone here knows the lies she’s told in the past and is looking to stop her efforts.
At the risk of spoiling anything else, I’ll stop there. If you’ve read Final Girls, I highly recommend reading The Last Time I Lied. It’s such consistent storytelling, and just enough is given and held back to make you keep turning the page. Like I said with Final Girls, this needs adapted to the screen! It’s a plot that you’d think would have been covered a million times before, but there is something so nuanced and fresh in the way that Sager writes his novels, that I am eagerly awaiting his new novel in arriving in July, Lock Every Door. If you’ve got any sense of good writing, you’ll give all these novels your attention.