[Review] The Last Time I Lied - Riley Sager

Summary: 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. (Pub Date: Jul 03, 2018)

While I liked Final Girls, I didn't think it deserved all the buzz, so I was both excited and hesitant about this new release. It blew me away. It's one of my favorite books of 2018, for sure.

Emma is back to the camp that caused her worst trauma, one she still hasn't been able to recover from, painting for fifteen years the faces of the three girls who vanished from the same cabin she was. At the same time it's scary, she also sees it as a chance for closure; if she can find out what happened to Vivian and the others, maybe...First, however, she'll need to deal with her own mistakes and lies.

This story happens in two timelines, one for Emma's return to the camp and the other for her memories of the days when she was thirteen and bedazzled by Vivian and her friends, who would eventually disappear.

The book really got me involved. It's not a hectic story, really. And yet, I couldn't stop reading it, making guesses, changing my guesses, going back, and repeat. I do remember feeling a little bit detached while reading Sager's previous work, Final Girls. While I'm still not sure which one is the best, The Last Time I Lied was a much more pleasing read.

I do think there were some characters acting to randomly—just for the purpose of the plot and no other explanation. All the mystery Vivian (and Emma) was researching seemed a little to non-consequential, and I still frown even after the final revelation. What annoyed me the most, though, was the lacking police work. I did understand it was a vast area but there were so many clues, so many things off I never got why they didn't see them. Lastly, some characters' motives seemed fishy and once we learn all the secrets they became simply weird, unless you consider they were just there to bait the reader. I don't think that's smart-plotting.

That said, I loved the conclusion. I mean, the whole story was nice, but if you've read Final Girls, you know Sager's known for the plot twists. That shouldn't disappoint you at all.

This is one of the books I'll be recommending to all my friends this year. Not perfect, but it's worth it.


Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.


Rating: 4 out of 5.