...a feminist, urgent call for justice, told in two distinct, unputdownable storylines...The pace is breathless and unrelenting, the thrills are evenly and deliberately placed, and the character reveals are deep, emotionally resonant and keenly observed...Clark’s handling of her dual perspectives and timelines is so skilled that you barely have the sense of her pulling the strings behind the scenes, or of being led into a mystery far deeper than you originally signed up for...Yet the mastery is there, pulsing and immediate...At the same time, Clark has managed to weave in a skewering takedown of the details we reveal on social media and how easily our own posts and check-ins can be used against us...This makes The Lies I Tell a smart and sharp cautionary tale, as well as an utterly unputdownable thriller.
Fifteen years ago, Ron Ashton rendered a teenaged Meg Williams homeless...Her mother fell in love with the successful real estate developer and was grateful when he agreed to help refinance their beloved home...Alas, he lied about the documentation as well as about his intentions; Meg's mom died not long after, leaving her daughter alone to deal with unresolved grief and sudden housing insecurity...But an incandescently angry Meg determinedly clawed her way to solvency one con job at a time, with impeccably thorough research as her secret weapon and terrible men as her favored targets....It's an exciting premise, bolstered by intriguingly detailed descriptions of Meg's various ruses, compelling character growth and lots of slow-building tension via complex manipulation...Clark has yet again crafted a fascinating pair of women who wrestle with trauma, sexism, identity and whether it's ever okay to do bad things for good reasons.
This intriguing thriller from bestseller Clark focuses on two 30-something women who are bent on revenge...Posing as a real estate agent, Meg Williams is a con artist who returns to Los Angeles to get even with Ron Ashton, a local politician who swindled her mother from their home when Meg was a teenager, forcing the two of them to live in a van...Unbeknownst to Meg, journalist/copyeditor Kat Roberts has been tracking Meg and is ready to take her down for a brief encounter that ruined Kat’s life 10 years earlier...Using flashbacks and alternating points of view, Clark skillfully fleshes out the strong, multifaceted characters...The story nicely mixes brisk plot points with slow burning reveals as it builds to a satisfying conclusion...Clark doesn’t disappoint.
