Book Review: The Lying Game

At school, they used to tell lies all the time. Points for getting someone to believe you, for how absurd the lie might be. It’s the kind of thing that groups of teenage girls do, and Ruth Ware depicts the group of friends in an incredibly convincing way. Seventeen years after they’ve all gone their separate ways, they each receive a text message: ‘I need you’.

And as soon as they can, each of them leaves their adult lives behind (with Isa, our narrator, bringing her newborn baby with her) and returns to Salten, where one of them is still living – will never leave, in fact – and where a human bone has recently been discovered.

They know whose bone it is, but the how and why of the death and body-disposal is left towards the end, with sufficient twists along the way to please the reader. This is a read-in-one-sitting book, a page-turner that will resonate with anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl, misfit or otherwise.