Sager’s second thriller is as tense and twisty as his best-selling Final Girls (2017), but this one is even more polished, with gut-wrenching plot surprises skillfully camouflaged by Emma’s paranoia and confusion, the increasingly creepy setting, and a cast of intriguingly secretive characters.
While Sager attempts to explore the intense dynamics within adolescent female friendships, an overly large cast of thinly sketched characters undermines the effort, and genre fans searching for more than the requisite ingredients of a solid thriller may find themselves unsatisfied. The book’s most vibrant exchanges take place in the past, between younger Emma and Vivian, the Queen Bee of Nightingale, who seduced Emma as only a wiser, more sophisticated girl could ... Compared to the piercing Vivian-Emma relationship, however, the rest of the female campers feel extraneous. Indeed, sometimes the only way to keep track of the many characters is by relying on the stereotypes employed to introduce them in rapid succession ... in the end, the author delivers the kind of unpredictable conclusion that all thriller readers crave—utterly shocking yet craftily foreshadowed. For some readers, though, these might be the only pages that linger.
The first half of The Last Time I Lied is sleekly written and involving. The second part seems to meander, then erupts in an abundance of physical action. Readers who persist to the novel’s truth-or-lie ending will be rewarded, though, with a startling, film-noir turn of fate.
As the story unfolds, Riley Sager takes readers on a dark, twisted, and thrilling ride, surging towards a shocking conclusion that’s so stunning it’ll leave readers gasping for air ... If you liked Final Girls, you will love Sager’s latest novel, which is a touch better and nearly impossible to put down. Not only is Sager a terrific writer, but, other than a semi-slow opening, the structure of this book combined with the pacing makes for an incredibly fast read that splits time between the present day and the events fifteen years prior. Readers will quickly blow through the three hundred and seventy pages in no time, racing to see what Emma uncovers. Even veteran readers of psychological suspense will be blindsided by the jarring conclusion.
Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is ... As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong ... The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense. Sophomore slump.
Sager intricately interweaves the past and present as Emma investigates further, realizing that not everyone she once knew can be trusted. A major twist toward the end compensates for the triteness of one of the big reveals. Sager remains a writer to watch
