PotsandPlots

First Lie Wins is a twisty thriller with an intriguing premise, but its flat characterisation and ultimately nonsensical plot let it down.

Growing Information:

Plant With: Thriller, Twists, Deception

Grows Into: A steady, occasionally surprising, book that fizzles to nothing

Rating: Garage Flowers 🌻(Check here for rating information.)

Available now in paperback (affiliate link).

The Review:

I feel a little bad about only giving First Lie Win one flower. It isn’t a terrible book, but equally, it certainly isn’t a good book either. It’s fine and no more than that.

It reads as though someone had a brilliant plot for a book, but almost no craft for writing it down. It’s functional. There are twists, but artful this ain’t.

Evie Turner is on a job. Her fiancé, Ryan, is an unwitting mark. Evie has been employed to get information from Ryan, who is not what he seems. His small-town America golden boy image is just a facade.

The first twist in the tale is when Ryan’s old schoolmate turns up with his new partner in tow. She introduces herself as Lucca Marino. That’s all well and good, but that can’t be her real name. Evie knows this because Lucca Marino is her real name.

And that’s a pretty great way to hook a reader. Evie is a con-artist and hustler turned spy, but now she needs to work out who this new threat is, why they’re here and who sent them.

As previously stated, this book is fine. It’s entertaining. The plot is intricate, and there are some great misdirect shenanigans and a couple of clever ploys from Evie to evade trouble.

The book had two problems for me. First, the book had an over-reliance on tech solutions. Evie is friends with a secret(ish) surveillance expert, come hacker, who could apparently do absolutely anything Evie (or indeed, Ashley Elston) needed to do, to make a particular plot thread work. By the end of the book, it didn’t feel at all realistic.

I probably could have coped with that, or it may have slipped by unnoticed if the characters had been a little stronger. They’re all two-dimensional. Cyphers for real people. If they’re morally grey, it’s a grey like bad soup.

Nobody in the book felt real. Ryan is part of a criminal enterprise, but it’s a criminal enterprise that only runs on Thursdays. There’s the shadowy Mr Smith, who is running Evie from behind the scenes, but his motivation for doing any of the things he does, during the book is nonsensical.

There are some good set pieces and a couple of interesting twists, but ultimately, First Lie Wins didn’t live up to the blurb hype. On obvious recent comparison is with Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid. Both have similar elements. Both have perposterous storylines, but some how McFadden makes her characters feel plausible. That book, I belived the characters motivations and as a result, their actions.

I don’t regret reading First Lie Wins, but I wouldn’t particularly recommened it others do the same.