Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Clare Mackintosh’s latest mystery, Let Me Lie, will hold you from the first page until the last.  It is as good as I Let You Go, her novel I reviewed in June, 2016, something I didn’t think was possible.

Let Me Lie opens with the voice of a dead person, but we don’t know who that person is.  That voice is interspersed between chapters told in two other voices–Anna Johnson’s and Murray Mackenzie’s.

Anna is a new mother.  She’s thrilled with her lovely daughter Ella and happy with her partner Mark, but she is grieving the loss of her parents.  Both committed suicide seven months apart at the infamous cliff at Beachy Head, and as the novel opens it’s the first anniversary of Anna’s mother’s death.  Neither body was recovered, but witnesses saw both husband and wife on top of the Head, loading their pockets with stones.  Her mother’s suicide was an exact replica of her father’s, something that is making Anna even more distraught.  Knowing how her mother had suffered after her husband’s death, Anna wonders how she could have done the same thing herself, leaving Anna bewildered and lost.

On this sad day, Anna is horrified to receive a Happy Anniversary card in the mail.  Who would do such a cruel thing, she wonders?  And the message inside is even worse.  Suicide?  Think again.

Both Mark and Anna’s Uncle Billy think the card is a despicable “joke” someone with a warped sense of humor is playing on her.  But Anna, who never felt that her parents were suicidal types, now thinks she has something concrete to go on.  She and Ella go to the local police station where they encounter Murray Mackenzie, a recently retired detective who is now a civilian volunteer on the force.

Bored with his retirement and moved by Anna’s sincerity in her belief that her parents were murdered, he agrees to look into the matter, although he does not plan to share his investigation with the active detectives.  Time enough to tell them when I find something significant, if in fact I do, he thinks.

Now for my confession:  at least four times while reading this novel I “knew” the next turn the story would take and how the book would end.  In each case I was totally wrong.  Just when I was certain someone was guilty and just when I could tell what the next wrinkle in the plot would be, I was wrong again.  Let Me Lie is like a roller coaster ride, but every twist and turn is believable.

Clare Mackintosh is a master in leading you astray so skillfully that you don’t even realize what’s happening.  Not until I had finished the book did I realize how much I had misread and how often I had jumped to conclusions.  I am delighted to have been so mislead so cunningly.

You can read more about Clare Mackintosh at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.