Mackintosh manages to tackle some very serious issues while weaving the tight but twisty plot and definitely keeping my attention. She takes on domestic abuse, alcoholism and mental illness with skill and compassion ... Her characters are very well-developed, three dimensional and very realistic. Her plot is skillfully developed with enough surprises to keep the reader engaged. The final line in the book leaves the reader with yet another question to ponder—masterful!
After a slow and soggy start, the narrative picks up as it follows Anna Johnson’s efforts to determine why her parents chose to commit suicide, seven months apart, by leaping from the cliffs at Beachy Head, 'a beautiful, haunting, agonizing place. At once uplifting and destroying.'
Let Me Lie’s Anna Johnson (oh, for an unusual surname, just once!) is less confused about the source of her pain [than other 'damaged' recent protagonists]. At 26, she’s freshly orphaned by her parents’ near-joint suicides, and a new mom to her own first child — conceived with her grief counselor, no less. But did her mother and father actually take their own lives? The answer...leads, eventually and inevitably, to a sort of piñata of sociopaths, a wicker basket full of crazy. And how much water can wicker hold? Not much, really, though the current ubiquity of novels like these seems to demand that the outcomes grow more outrageous with each new wave, as if we’ve become too saturated to accept anything less than a bonanza from our big reveals. And Mackintosh and [Alice] Feeney — both shrewd, skillful writers — obligingly deliver, even if the end reward feels a lot like diminishing returns.
Mackintosh’s three bar-raising psychological thrillers (starting with I Let You Go, 2016) have proven her adept at crafting compellingly flawed, authority-bucking characters and creating twists from the ripple effects of their relationships and personal issues, including abuse, mental illness, and alcoholism. This one’s perfect for Kate Atkinson and Tana French readers.
Mackintosh cleverly subverts readers’ expectations while capitalizing on the complicated nature of parent-child relationships. Shocking twists share the page with meditations on love, loss, marriage, and mental illness, and though not every revelation feels earned, the overall story amply satisfies.
