Beautiful Lies
by Lisa Unger

Release Date: 3rd Apr 2008
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 978 0 099 52213 3
RRP: Ł9.99

Beautiful Lies is not what I expected. In short, I was thinking – thriller, therefore lots of blood and a gruesome killer on the loose. What I got instead was something that took a normal family crisis and turned it into a provocative and emotive story about what happens when you make the wrong decision for the right reasons.

Inevitably, the plot begins with a fateful day when Ridley Jones (Ungers new heroine) saves a toddler from certain death and is inadvertently made into an instant regional celebrity. Her fifteen minutes of fame results in the receipt of a letter – one that will lead Ridley to unravel her current life and question everything and everyone in it. Whilst it is true that Ridley undergoes an uncomfortable transformation from unquestioning, mild mannered and obedient daughter – it is the subplot – the raison d’ętre of the novel – that is so emotionally loaded and thereby super-charging an otherwise run-of-the-mill “thriller” come personal journey of devastation.

The title is a stroke of genius though and links seamlessly with the question many of us have at one time or other posed to ourselves – would we rather have remained in ignorant bliss, or be forced to face a brutal truth? It is a rhetoric that Ridley herself argues over throughout the novel... and the inevitable realisation that sometimes the lies might be beautiful and the truth ugly and sore, but once your eyes are opened to the possibility of an alternative truth to the one you once believed – can you ever really fall back into the arms of those beautiful lies?

Unger is a master storyteller, with her swift, direct dialogue and multidimensional characters; you are at once sucked in to the turmoil that is Ridley’s rapidly unravelling life. There is the odd murder thrown in for good measure, but bloodlust is not the name of the game here. And this is not the last time we will see Ridley either. I will be intrigued to see how she is developed.

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