Review - The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Release date: 15 June 2017

Rating: ****

Back cover blurb: The text message arrives in the small hours of the night. It’s just three words: I need you. Isa drops everything, takes her baby daughter and heads straight to Salten. She spent the most significant days of her life at boarding school on the marshes there, days which still cast their shadow over her. At school Isa and her three best friends used to play the Lying Game. They competed to convince people of the most outrageous stories. Now, after seventeen years of secrets, something terrible has been found on the beach. Something which will force Isa to confront her past, together with the three women she hasn't seen for years, but has never forgotten. Theirs is no cosy reunion: Salten isn't a safe place for them, not after what they did. It’s time for the women to get their story straight…

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started The Lying Game, and actually looking back, that's probably a good thing. For this book to have maximum impact I do think it's best to go in to it blind.

If I'm totally honest, I'm not sure I enjoyed the first couple of chapters, this story is quite slow to get started in terms of things actually happening. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but here I feel like it takes a long time to get to the point maybe?

But that's where my discontent with this novel ends, because as soon as I got to that point, I was genuinely hooked. The Lying Game revolves around four friends, Isa, Kate, Thea and Fatima, who were together as teenagers at a boarding school in Salten.

The four were inseparable in boarding school, all took part in the lying game, a silly school girl game designed to make anyone in the school believe the most outrageous lies for the purposes of scoring points against one another.

Is it Salten where they are all summoned to meet again, in the middle of the night via a text message from Kate 'I need you'. None of them question dropping everything in their new adult lives, the fact that they are needed is their only concern.

Something bad must have happened for Kate to summon them all back there. Something that could ruin their lives forever. For all four women are harbouring a secret, the final devastating lie in their lying game, and now they are terrified that the truth is about to come out.

The Lying Game is available now via Amazon online and all good book shops.

Thank You to the publishers who invited me to view this title in exchange for an honest review.