Summary

“I’M GOING TO KILL HER. YOU’D BETTER COME IF YOU WANT TO SAVE HER.”

Lorraine – “Rainy” – lives at the top of Tiger Mountain. Remote, moody, cloistered in pine trees and fog, it’s a sanctuary, a new life. She can hide from the disturbing past she wants to forget.

If she’s allowed to.

When Rainy reluctantly agrees to a girl’s weekend in Vegas, she’s prepared for an exhausting parade of shots and slot machines. But after a wild night, her friend Braithe doesn’t come back to the hotel room.

And then Rainy gets the text message, sent from Braithe’s phone: someone has her. But Rainy is who they really want, and Rainy knows why.

What follows is a twisted, shocking journey on the knife-edge of life and death. If Rainy wants to save Braithe – and herself – the only way is to step back into the past.

Why I chose to read this book
After reading The Wives by Tarryn Fisher, I was excited to read another one of Fisher’s psychological thrillers. I wanted to see what else she could come up with, and if it would be just as twisted.

Thoughts & Opinions

If a psychological thriller doesn’t stress you out and make your heart beat faster, is it really a psychological thriller? An Honest Lie is indeed a psychological thriller because it had me stressed! 

Rainy, the main character, has a troubled past she doesn’t want to share with her significant other Grant nor with his friends. At first, I thought, why not share some of your past trauma with your significant other? Why does everything have to be a secret, what’s the harm in sharing? Wouldn’t sharing deepen your connection? But the more I read about her past, the more I understood. Sometimes things are so deeply traumatic people are just not ready to share, or are afraid of how others might perceive them.

When Grant’s friends pressure Rainy into a girl’s trip to Vegas, she eventually – albeit reluctantly – agrees. This made me uneasy because she should have felt strong enough to stand her ground and refuse to go. She hasn’t known Grant’s friends that long, one of them makes her uncomfortable and she feels something is off with this group of girls. Oh and one important detail, Nevada is the source of all the evils from her past. Why accept then? For the purpose of the story she had to say yes and if all stories were logical, we wouldn’t have any interesting stories now, would we? Although, I have a feeling she subconsciously felt like she had to go in order to heal and face the belly of the beast, but didn’t know it yet. 

I’ve never been to Vegas but I’ve seen enough movies to know it’s a party city full of woo-girls. Which sounds like a total nightmare for someone like Rainy, an antisocial introvert. I like her. 

Every few chapters we go back in time, to when Rainy was younger, and dive into her sinister past where her and her mom were trying to survive. It is not pretty. It’s extremely frustrating and shocking. I was thoroughly impressed by how Rainy, at such a young age, was always worried and looking out for her mother. That shows a lot of maturity and love. Sometimes we can’t see how our parents suffered for us, until we are much older. As teenagers, we tend to blame them for everything gone wrong. But Rainy recognizes her mom’s suffering. 

Back in Vegas, Rainy could not be with a worse group of girls. They make her feel excluded and there’s an unsettling feeling that they all know something she doesn’t. As if she wasn’t already dealing with enough!

In this book, Rainy makes a series of decisions that I didn’t necessarily agree with, but then again, I haven’t lived her life. You know when you watch a horror movie and you scream at the characters for running towards the creepy sound instead of away? That’s the feeling I had for some of her decisions. 

Per every classic psychological thriller, the ending is dramatic and crazy; a satisfying finality to the insanity.

Once again, Fisher has belted out a page-turner. And if you’re fascinated by cults, this is a good one.

Interested in reading my other psychological thriller reviews?

The Wives

Nowhere To Hide

A Stranger on the Beach