The Last Lie

Claire and Alfie Daniels are the ideal loving couple or so it seems to the rest of the world. Claire's dreams of having a child puts things into a very different perspective. This page turner of a book is a thoroughly enjoyable read. I won't say much else about the story as the entire book is twisting and turning with plots and manipulations. The author, Alex Lake, writes a in simple dialogue style giving as much emphasis on the inner dialogue of the characters as their dialogue with each other. It is a very quick read and I recommend it.

I really enjoyed this book. Although it wasn’t the most frightening of thrillers, and you could probably guess what was happening, it was still a gripping read. I read it in a day, as I was desperate to find out how it played out.

This book is a thriller and a page turner. I enjoyed it up to a point but found the whole plot implausible. A convenient twist at the end, though.

Claire Daniels has married Alfie, the man of her dreams, and she couldn’t be happier. The only fly in the ointment is that they haven’t yet managed to start a family. From Alfie’s perspective things are rather different. He has married Claire as part of a longer term game plan and the whole relationship is based on lies, lots and lots of lies. But lies seem to have a way of finding you out and when cracks start to appear, Alfie’s plan is in danger of unravelling at an alarming rate.

As psychological thrillers go, this has got to be up there with the best of them. The book is a page-turner extraordinaire and I was hooked from beginning to end. The plot is brilliantly constructed and the story is written in a way which maximises the tension. Chapter endings regularly end with cliffhangers and this gadget is used unashamedly and very effectively. It is a complex storyline and I am not always very good at following complicated plots. However, in this case I understood what was going on without expending vast amounts of brainpower and without resorting to searching back through what I had already read to find things which I had either missed or forgotten in order to make sense of some new development. The two main characters are well developed and play their parts well. Although I couldn’t necessarily relate to Alfie, his character seemed to make sense and to be consistent throughout.

The only negative thing that I can conjure up is something that only hit me once I had finished reading the book. The whole thing is entirely implausible. However, while reading it I was so gripped that this didn’t even occur to me.

Alex Lake seems to be quite a prolific writer. Although I have not come across her before, I will certainly be looking out for more of her work in the future.

The whole group enjoyed this book and felt that it was a page-turner, easy to get into and hard to put down. However, we felt that once the story really got going, it was quite predictable and that the ending was particularly far-fetched.