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Book Review of Never Lie

Never Lie
robinmy avatar reviewed on + 2049 more book reviews


Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan have been house hunting. They've set up an appointment with a realtor to look at a huge house outside of the city. When they arrive, the snow is coming down and the realtor is a no-show. Lucky for them, the house is open. When they start looking around, they discover that this house was owned by Dr. Adrienne Hale, a well-known psychiatrist who disappeared without a trace nearly four years ago. Her house hasn't been touched since that time.

As soon as they arrive, Tricia gets a creepy feeling that there is someone else in the house. As the snowstorm continues, they are snowed in until the driveway can be cleared. Tricia looks for a book to pass the time and runs across a secret room containing hundreds of cassette tapes of Dr. Hale's sessions with her patients. As Tricia listens to the tapes, she learns about Dr. Hale and the truth of what led up to her disappearance.

I'm going to have to start avoiding any books known as psychological thrillers. I find that I typically don't like the characters and the narrator is usually unreliable. (There are a few exceptions.) In this story we get Tricia's first-person point-of-view, along with flashbacks to Adrienne and her psychiatry practice, and we get to listen to some of her session tapes. It sounds confusing, but it was easy to follow. There was a lot of inner dialogue in this book. Tricia's thoughts seemed very repetitive at times. We went over a few things many, many times.

I had theories as to what was happening, but I ended up being way off base. There were some huge twists in this story. But when it came to the end of the story, I realized that there were some things we were told in the first half of the book, that didn't make any sense by the end of the book. Sigh...I just shouldn't read psychological thrillers. My rating: 2.5 Stars.