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The lying game : a novel
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2017
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The Lying Game The sound is just an ordinary text alert, a quiet beep beep in the night that does not wake Owen, and would not have woken me except that I was already awake, lying there, staring into the darkness, the baby at my breast snuffling, not quite feeding, not quite unlatching. I lie there for a moment thinking about the text, wondering who it could be. Who'd be texting at this hour? None of my friends would be awake . . . unless it's Milly gone into labor already . . . God, it can't be Milly, can it? I'd promised to take Noah if Milly's parents couldn't get up from Devon in time to look after him, but I never really thought . . . I can't quite reach the phone from where I'm lying, and at last I unlatch Freya with a finger in the corner of her mouth, and rock her gently onto her back, milk-sated, her eyes rolling back in her head like someone stoned. I watch her for a moment, my palm resting lightly on her firm little body, feeling the thrum of her heart in the birdcage of her chest as she settles, and then I turn to check my phone, my own heart quickening slightly like a faint echo of my daughter's. As I tap in my PIN, squinting slightly at the brightness of the screen, I tell myself to stop being silly--it's four weeks until Milly's due, it's probably just a spam text, Have you considered claiming a refund for your payment protection insurance? But, when I get the phone unlocked, it's not Milly. And the text is only three words. I need you. * * * IT IS 3:30 A.M., AND I am very, very awake, pacing the cold kitchen floor, biting at my fingernails to try to quell the longing for a cigarette. I haven't touched one for nearly ten years, but the need for one ambushes me at odd moments of stress and fear. I need you. I don't need to ask what it means--because I know, just as I know who sent it, even though it's from a number I don't recognize. Kate. Kate Atagon. Just the sound of her name brings her back to me, like a vivid rush--the smell of her soap, the freckles across the bridge of her nose, cinnamon against olive. Kate. Fatima. Thea. And me. I close my eyes and picture them all, the phone still warm in my pocket, waiting for the texts to come through. Fatima will be lying asleep beside Ali, curled into his spine. Her reply will come around 6:00 a.m., when she gets up to make breakfast for Nadia and Samir and get them ready for school. Thea--Thea is harder to picture. If she's working nights she'll be in the casino, where phones are forbidden to staff and shut up in lockers until their shifts are finished. She'll roll off shift at eight in the morning, perhaps? Then she'll have a drink with the other girls, and then she'll reply, wired up with a successful night dealing with punters, collating chips, watching for cardsharps and professional gamblers. And Kate. Kate must be awake--she sent the text, after all. She'll be sitting at her dad's worktable--hers now, I suppose--in the window overlooking the Reach, with the waters turning pale gray in the predawn light, reflecting the clouds and the dark hulk of the Tide Mill. She will be smoking, as she always did. Her eyes will be on the tides, the endlessly shifting, eddying tides, on the view that never changes and yet is never the same from one moment to the next--just like Kate herself. Her long hair will be drawn back from her face, showing her fine bones, and the lines that thirty-two years of wind and sea have etched at the corners of her eyes. Her fingers will be stained with oil paint, ground into the cuticles, deep beneath the nails, and her eyes will be at their darkest slate blue, deep and unfathomable. She will be waiting for our replies. But she knows what we'll say--what we've always said, whenever we got that text, those three words. I'm coming. I'm coming. I'm coming. Excerpted from The Lying Game: A Novel by Ruth Ware All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Fiction/Biography Profile
Characters
Kate (Female), She and three other girls were inseparable during boarding school where they played a game of lies with other students and faculty; they were expelled in their final year of school after the mysterious death of her father, the art teacher at school
Genre
Fiction
Thriller
Suspense
Psychological
Topics
Female friendship
Lies
Deception
Teachers
Mysterious deaths
Death of a parent
Setting
London, England - Europe
Time Period
2000s -- 21st century
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Trade Reviews
New York Times Review
A single cryptic text, "I need you," reunites four friends in the stippled light of an English seaside village just as surely as it signals readers that they're in the hands of a pro. Ware sets her psychological puzzle in a crumbling old mill on the Reach, where a marshy river meets the glimmering sea. It's the home of Kate, who summons her old friends Isa, Thea and Fatima when the discovery of a human bone in the shifting sand threatens to reveal misdeeds from their boarding-school days 17 years earlier. Ware further complicates the guessing game with the disclosure that the teenagers once played a game of their own invention, awarding points for telling convincing lies to taunt their classmates. Now the former clique must separate truth from deception as the stakes ratchet higher amid the growing possibility that someone close to them has committed murder. "A lie," says the narrator, Isa, no slouch at the game. "I'd almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening." Capable as she is, Ware hasn't worked out all the kinks of believability. Would Isa, a hyperprotective new mother, keep returning to the creepy mill with her baby as threats mount, the electricity fails and the sea threatens to swallow any route of escape? But for the most part, "The Lying Game" makes good on its premise that tall tales have consequences, especially when they're exposed to the glare of truth.
Library Journal Review
Four women, friends since their teen years spent at a boarding school on the English Channel, are thrown together again after nearly 20 years when a body surfaces in the marsh, threatening to destroy all of their carefully constructed lives-and lies. Narrator Isa, a new mom on maternity leave, joins Fatima, a no-nonsense physician who recently reconnected with her Muslim faith; Thea, a beauty who struggles with addiction; and Kate, a troubled artist who never left the small coastal town and lives in a rickety old mill house that's slowly sinking into the surrounding lands. As adolescents, the girls spent many long weekends at the mill house with Ambrose, Kate's artist father, and Luc, her stepbrother. At school, they smoked, drank, snuck out of the dorms at night, and played "the lying game," an ongoing competition to see who could convince their peers and teachers to believe the most outlandish tales. Unlike In a Dark, Dark Wood or The Woman in Cabin 10, Ware's third novel has a more leisurely pacing and values character development over nail-biting suspense. The mystery unfolds slowly and the "big reveal" is likely to be guessed at by observant readers. VERDICT Though not as chill-inducing as her previous titles, Ware's latest offers nuanced characters, an atmospheric small-town British setting, and a satisfying mystery. [See Prepub Alert, 1/23/17.]-Kiera Parrott, School Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
When Isa Wilde, the narrator of this engrossing psychological thriller from bestseller Ware (The Woman in Cabin 10), gets a text-"I need you"-from old friend Kate Atagon, she knows she must drop everything in London and go to Salten, a town on England's south coast, where the two attended Salten House, a cut-rate boarding school. Doctor Fatima Qureshy and casino dealer Thea West, who also attended Salten House, receive the same message. At school, the four girls perfected what they called the Lying Game, with myriad rules and intricate scoring. An incident that caused the girls to leave before their senior year looms large as Isa, Fatima, and Thea gather at the house where Kate has always lived with her father, Salten's art master. Kate informs the group about a riverbank discovery-a human bone-that could unravel the foursome's 17-year pact of silence. Alternating between the past and present, Ware builds up a rock-solid cast of intriguing characters and spins a mystery that will keep readers turning pages to the end. Agent: Eve White, Eve White Literary Agency (U.K.). (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The text I need you demolishes the careful distance Isa Wilde has placed between her life as a happily married new mother and the painful, life-changing term she spent at Salten House boarding school. Long-estranged friends Isa, Thea, and Fatima answer Kate Atagon's text by returning to Salten, where Kate still lives in her father's decomposing millhouse. Ambrose Atagon, a well-known artist, was Salten's art teacher and frequent host of the girls' away weekends. He disappeared that final year amid rumors of inappropriate relationships with the girls, leaving the four friends with a disastrous secret. Now a body has been found in the marsh surrounding the house, and the women need to get their stories straight before the inevitable knock at the door. Once they are together, though, the years of distance and memories of their deceptive pastime, the Lying Game, breed suspicion. Ware masterfully harnesses the millhouse's decrepit menace to create a slow-rising sense of foreboding, darkening Isa's recollections of the weeks leading to Ambrose's disappearance. Previous blockbusters (including The Woman in Cabin 10, 2016) guarantee popularity for Ware's latest thriller, and, with arguably her most complex, fully realized characters yet, this one may become her biggest hit yet.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2017 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Suspense queen Ware's (The Woman in Cabin 10, 2016, etc.) third novel in three years introduces four women who have been carrying a terrible secret since their boarding school days, a secret that is about to be literally unearthed.Isa Wilde, happy in her life as a new mother, receives a text one morning that simply reads, I need you, and hours later, she boards a train bound for the coastal village of Salten with her infant daughter in tow. She has come at her friend Kate's summons, and soon they are joined by two other women who received the same text, Thea and Fatima. Fifteen years earlier, all four were best friends at Salten House, sneaking off campus on the weekends to spend time with Kate's father, an art teacher, and her handsome, mysterious brother, Luc. Their school days ended in tragedy and scandal, however, and the four haven't been back to Salten since they were expelled. Now, a bone has been found in the marshes, and Kate has called the others back in a panic. They know more about the body than they should, but even they don't know the truth. Ware's third outing is just as full of psychological suspense as her earlier books, but there is a quietness about this one, a slower unraveling of tension and fear, that elevates it above her others. Though there's still a fair dash of drama, it doesn't veer into the realm of melodrama, developing consistently with the characters and with their personalities and pasts. Isa is a sympathetic narrative voice though her obsession with the concerns of new parenthood may put some readers off. Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won't want to move until it's over. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
New York Times Bestseller

From the instant New York Times bestselling author of blockbuster thrillers In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 comes Ruth Ware's chilling new novel, The Lying Game .

On a cool June morning, a woman is walking her dog in the idyllic coastal village of Salten along a tidal estuary known as the Reach. Before she can stop him, the dog charges into the water to retrieve what first appears to be a wayward stick, but to her horror, turns out to be something much more sinister...

The next morning, three women in and around London--Fatima, Thea, and Isabel--receive the text they had always hoped would NEVER come, from the fourth in their formerly inseparable clique, Kate, that says only, "I need you."

The four girls were best friends at Salten, a second rate boarding school set near the cliffs of the English Channel. Each different in their own way, the four became inseparable and were notorious for playing the Lying Game, telling lies at every turn to both fellow boarders and faculty, with varying states of serious and flippant nature that were disturbing enough to ensure that everyone steered clear of them. The myriad and complicated rules of the game are strict: no lying to each other--ever. Bail on the lie when it becomes clear it is about to be found out. But their little game had consequences, and the girls were all expelled in their final year of school under mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the school's eccentric art teacher, Ambrose (who also happens to be Kate's father).

Atmospheric, twisty, and with just the right amount of chill that will keep you wrong-footed--which has now become Ruth Ware's signature style-- The Lying Game is sure to be her next big bestseller. Another unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.
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