“My mother always says the only way two people can keep a secret,” she says, “is if one of them is dead.”
Don’t you just hate it when you’re visiting the mansion of a missing person, your estate agent doesn’t show up and you’re forced to rifle through the property digging up all the hidden secrets said missing person has left behind? We cannot tell you how many times that has happened to us. On a completely unrelated note, we just finished reading Never Lie by Freida McFadden. Check out What We Reading as we sit on the psychiatrist’s chair and walk you through our Never Lie book review!
Date Published: 2022
Author: Freida McFadden
Genre: Thriller, Mystert
Pages: 286
Goodreads Rating: 4.15/5
Premise
Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan are looking for their dream home. When they visit the remote mansion owned by Dr. Adrienne Hale, a renowned psychiatrist who disappeared years earlier, a violent winter storm leaves them stranded inside for the night.
With no other way of keeping herself entertained, Tricia looks for a book to read. But, after picking out Stephen King’s The Shining, she stumbles upon a secret room behind the bookcase, revealing a library’s worth of cassettes Adrienne has recorded from all of her patient sessions. Curiosity leads her to Tricia listening to a number of these cassettes, revealing the dark secrets of Adrienne’s last days and, eventually, how she met her final fate.
What Worked
These sorts of stories are just fun, aren’t they? Locked-room mystery and a couple of characters to peel back the curtains on, revealing all grizzly secrets.
Off the bat, this is one of those books that is just so easy to dive into and demolish. At 286 pages for the paperback, we rinsed through it and McFadden’s breathless pacing was a big reason for this. Out of all the books we’ve reviewed here at What We Reading, this was one of the best marriages between plot and pacing with all the developments and twists delivered at a searing rate.
During the first third of the book, we were worried that McFadden had made things too easy to guess. Any veteran readers of the site will know that we are notoriously bad at guessing twists, so we were holding out that these were red herrings we were picking up on. We’re going to keep things spoiler-free in this review, but how everything worked out certainly caught us off guard so fair play, Freida. You got us.
What Didn’t
For what it is, Never Lie doesn’t get much wrong. It’s not the most profound book anyone is ever likely to read and, to be fair, it’s not trying to be. Some of the suspense and twists are undeniably spoon-fed, but this is a popcorn thriller in every sense of the term.
However, there are a few instances where the characters drift into the ‘one-dimensional’ category. They deliver lines that feel like an NPC in a video game might make, and how some of them completely flip their personalities felt a bit jarring, especially in the closing acts. These changes feel like they have happened because the reader now knows something about them and they now need to reflect those developments, rather than anything else. There could have been stronger ways of hinting at these characters having more depth without spoiling anything.
On that, there are times when McFadden’s writing style feels… strange. Certain passages feel overly basic in how they are composed, and it takes some getting used to. They are more present in the Tricia portions of the book rather than the Adrienne segments, but we can’t say we were a fan of how they make Tricia, the environment and events at play sound.
Verdict
Never Lie is a classic locked-room mystery that succeeds in enthralling readers in its claustrophobic environment. We were expecting the premise of a missing psychiatrist, a grand estate and her left-behind cassettes to deliver a more eerie feeling, but what Freida McFadden delivers is still a searingly-delivered thriller that anyone can have fun with.
The characters are a little on the bland side for the most part, save for Dr. Adrienne Hale. Her portions of the book felt like the most assured, with her profession as a psychiatrist and an academic mirroring her personality in a way the others don’t match. McFadden is a practising physician in the real world, so it makes sense why these portions felt so much more polished.
Overall though, Never Lie is a fast-paced ride that subverted our expectations but still left things nicely tied up. For your next psychological thriller, you could certainly do a lot worse than this!
Our Verdict: 3.5/5
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
