Friday, January 18, 2019

This ain't no picnic, and it ain't no country club either

After reading through the pseudonymous Riley Sager's  Final Girls last year, I approached The Last Time I Lied with some trepidation. Thankfully, whomever Riley really is evidently got some better editing this time around, because the pacing and suspense is SO much better.

We get introduced to Emma Davis at the outset, mainly through a flashback she has to 15 years prior, when her three cabin mates from Dogwood Cabin at Camp Nightingale vanished into thin air sometime in the early morning of July 5th. From there, we slowly meet Emma the New York City artist who's painting exhibition of woodland scenes have 3 girls always hiding behind the foliage.

Emma, who's never really had a real romantic relationship thanks to the stress coming out of that particular summer instead prefers the company of gay men mostly, other than a long distance affair with a French Sculptor whom she hooks up with on his brief visits to the city. Into her gallery opening walks Frannie Harris-White, the owner of Camp Nightingale, who buys a painting and invites Emma to lunch at her penthouse.

Seems Ms. Harris-White is reopening the camp, this time with underprivileged girls filling the cabins rather than the more well heeled members of New York society's daughters. As such, she wants Emma to return as the painting instructor for the summer. Which Emma does eventually accept, thinking maybe returning to the woods and Midnight Lake will help her to find out what happened to her friends Vivian, Natalie, and Allison.

As most folks who've gone camping for an extended period can attest, reentry is a pain. It takes some time for Emma to get comfortable again, particularly with Ms Frannie Harris-White and her two sons (Theo, a doctor and the one Emma accused of killing the three girls; and Chet, Theo's younger brother, who's wife Mindy is also on staff) and Frannie's assistant Lottie running the camp. There's a real sense of insecurity among the players, as no one really knows how comfortable everyone should be with one another after the way things ended 15 years ago. Emma gets assigned to be Den mother to the three girls assigned to Dogwood cabin for this new session, who remind her of the three missing girls. We find out about the motion activated camera attached to the door of Dogwood to ensure Emma neither causes or receives any trouble. We meet two other staff members from the same year when Emma was a camper. We continue flashing back 15 years, watching the girls play Two Truths and a Lie, a game Emma ends up teaching her new charges, Miranda, Krystal, and Sasha.

In the trunk that belonged to Vivian 15 years ago, Emma finds a map and a very old picture. The map eventually leads to Vivian's diary, which leads Emma to believe that the Harris family is hiding something. Sadly, Emma is also being watched in the shower, having a few crows dropped in Dogwood, and having LIAR painted across the cabin door in bright red paint.

All of which comes to a head, when on July 5th, Emma wakes to find her three new girls missing without a trace.

Emma becomes a prime suspect, not only because of the events of 15 years prior, but also her own institutionalization after stress induced hallucinations. Her habit of tossing out accusations at everyone like it's a game of Clue doesn't help either.

Anyway, in the end, we find all six of the girls and in the epilogue get most of the rest of the story. Mind you, the final solution makes sense to a point, but leaves more than a few unanswered questions. I can live with that, particularly since my guesses as to what was actually going on were wrong, unlike the last book.

As I stated at the outset, the pacing is much better this time around. While some of the intermingling of time is a little rough, particularly at the outset, and we're never really sure what's real and what's not, thanks to the unreliability of the narrator, it's still a fine novel. I'm much more inclined to read further books by our hidden author should more appear in the future now.

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