Never Lie by Freida McFadden

Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan are searching for the house of their dreams.
 

But when they visit the remote manor that once belonged to Dr. Adrienne Hale, a renowned psychiatrist who vanished without a trace four years earlier, a violent winter storm traps them at the estate… with no chance of escape until the blizzard comes to an end.
 

In search of a book to keep her entertained until the snow abates, Tricia happens upon a secret room. One that contains audio transcripts from every single patient Dr. Hale has ever interviewed. As Tricia listens to the cassette tapes, she learns about the terrifying chain of events leading up to Dr. Hale’s mysterious disappearance.
 

Tricia plays the tapes one by one, late into the night. With each one, another shocking piece of the puzzle falls into place, and Dr. Adrienne Hale’s web of lies slowly unravels.
 

And then Tricia reaches the final cassette.
 

The one that reveals the entire horrifying truth.

Freida McFadden’s Never Lie is a thriller / psychological crime thriller that has a great plot, some wild (and polarizing) twists, and a premise involving found evidence that never gets old (in this case, tape recordings from therapy sessions). On paper, this should be a standout but unfortunately the execution with the details and the prose left a lot to be desired for me. The biggest twist near the conclusion is a great idea that simply conflicts with the rest of the narrative and makes the entire book’s plot unbelievable.

Starting off with the good, Never Lie’s setting at a remote manor that also served as a home office for a mysterious psychiatrist was a great setup. The premise involving found audio tapes recorded by Dr. Adrienne Hale and her clients is a narrative concept I love and the snowed-in setup was a great narrative choice to not only trap Tricia and Ethan in the manor, but to also serve as a plausible source for the odd noises due to snowfall. The core crime mystery involving Adrienne’s sudden disappearance a few years ago and reliving her last known days through the tapes and a split narrative was a page-turner; I finished this in just under three days. These tapes are labeled with initials of the client involved, the date, and certain colors representing regular sessions vs each client’s last session, one of which also involving Adrienne’s boyfriend Luke who was a suspect in her disappearance. While the suspenseful ambiance in the seemingly deserted manor didn’t do much for me personally (more on that below), I found the crime-angle to be very well planned. Every character had a role in the events surrounding Adrienne’s murder and the reveals were exciting to read. It also helps that although the book was listed with 30e pages, the font size was actually quite large and is very quick to read through.

There was only one problem with those character plot reveals, and it’s a notable one that was impossible for me to overlook or ignore. Note, this is major spoilers for the book and while I generally avoid going too heavily into spoilers, this time they had so much influence on my enjoyment of the book due to the severity of the details:

View Spoiler » When it is revealed that Tricia was one of Adrienne’s past clients referred to as PL in her tapes, it throws all of the book’s credibility out of the window. It’s made even worse when it’s revealed that Tricia was directly involved and fully aware of the entire situation involving EJ and had previously met every other character recorded on Adrienne’s tapes. While this should’ve been an earth-shattering plot twist, it makes zero sense due to the fact that Never Lie is written in the first-person present tense from Tricia’s perspective. Up to that point, Tricia constantly goes on about how she doesn’t know where this house is (despite having gone many times as a client meeting Adrienne at her manor/home office), makes a big deal about exploring the house and “finding a bathroom”, discovering Adrienne’s master bedroom, closet, and attic. In Tricia’s own words, after she killed Adrienne and buried her on the property, she meticulously searched every nook and cranny for EJ’s body and planned to return prior to their house viewing. Therefore she should already have vast knowledge of the layout of the manor, its contents, and the past events yet seemingly doesn’t for the first 200 pages of the book. She found a room that she determined must have been Adrienne’s home office and wondered what else was in the room when she sat in that very room as a client for numerous sessions.

The inconsistencies are even more numerous when it’s revealed that Adrienne already hired a company to snow plow the driveway before she and Ethan had scheduled a house visit, yet during the drive over she comments about starting to regret the trip due to being stranded and the bad weather only to admit this trip was already a bad idea due to the possibility of Ethan finding evidence of her crime. On the other hand Ethan says multiple times how he loves the house and also bumbles around not knowing where things are despite having been to this house many times to drop off his mother Gail who was also a client (they have the manor’s address which they should’ve recognized from how many times they both went there previously). And then when Ethan discovers the body in the hidden floor space under a couch, how in the world does Tricia mistakenly consider that the body is Adrienne when she herself killed and buried her elsewhere? Had this book been written in a 2nd person perspective, it would’ve allowed the reader to be told the story from Tricia who could choose how to describe the events and what details to omit rather than experiencing everything Tricia does in real-time, thoughts included. This story tries to pull plot twists that would require an unreliable narrator without actually using it and being able to plausibly explain Tricia’s misleading directions. You hear and experience all of Tricia’s internal thoughts which completely contradicts everything about her past actions and events which destroys all of the credibility of the plot. « Hide Spoiler

The biggest reveal and plot problem aside, the book was also filled with so many plot holes that it started to become unintentionally funny. View Spoiler » Tricia determined the house was completely untouched due to a layer of dust coating everything except for a single footprint in the kitchen. However with the fridge fully stocked with food and a later discovery that someone else had been in the house very recently, it makes no sense the dust was only disrupted in a single spot in the entire manor. Tricia listened to the tapes and didn’t fully recognize EJ’s voice despite having kidnapped him herself. « Hide Spoiler

The character logic and movement also made little sense. View Spoiler » Despite being initially forced to attend therapy sessions by her Mom, why did she continue to attend more sessions of her own free will despite the likelihood that Adrienne would discover the true nature of her crime. Losing his job and life after being accused of Adrienne’s murder, why would Luke return and squatt in her house of all places when that would be the most incriminating place to be found? Also everyone in the book assumes Adrienne was murdered but after the police investigated, they found no evidence to support the theory so why do they treat it as a murder rather than a missing person case? And once in the manor, why would he sleep in the attic in a sleeping bag of all places when there’s multiple other bedrooms? You could make an argument that he was sleeping in the attic to avoid detection while the real estate agent Judy was trying to sell the house, yet all the food in the fridge is a dead giveaway of his presence anyway. And whatever happened to Adrienne’s portrait that seemingly moved on its own in the middle of the night? No explanation is given and this is not the type of thriller that has any remote supernatural elements at play. Tricia also claims to know almost nothing about her husband’s Ethan life, inner demons, tendencies despite having dated him for a year (red flag alert on top of her marrying him after six months). Yet again this conflicts with her fully knowing that Ethan was the son of Gail who she thought was cute, followed by her complete manufacturing of their meeting and relationship. « Hide Spoiler Character motives and movements just did not make sense at all but they could’ve worked with some tweaks.

Besides the endless inconsistencies and issues with conflicting plot threads, unfortunately I also greatly disliked the prose and Freida’s writing style. Thrillers really only need to have a functional prose to get the job done, but I found the writing to be surprisingly poor and tonally at complete odds with the psychological thriller story it was trying to tell. The writing felt both incredibly simple and crude, coming off quite amateurish and elementary. The internal dialogue and Tricia’s exploration also felt shallow, bland, tedious and made me facepalm “no duh” spelling out every single discovery and repeating it until it was hammered into my brain. McFadden’s attempts at foreshadowing also had the subtlety of a car crash that had me eye-rolling at how hard it was trying to be ominous and dramatic. I read a review that described the writing as being click-baiting which is a very appropriate description.

I don’t know if this description is something most people will understand, but you know of Myer Brigg’s personality types and factors? This book felt like it was written and pitched entirely for sensing and feeling readers that don’t have an intuitive bone in their body. Characters would cry or break down at situations that are far from being emotional, the biggest offender being Adrienne’s overreaction to EJ’s actions and her childish response (seriously, the way she talked did not sound anything remotely like a professional with a PhD in psychology). And I do not mean this to be a derogatory remark outside of the quality of the book (bad coincidence considering yesterday’s events), but its tone felt to me like dumb high school valley girl. The tone was so womanly with so many unnecessary details about Tricia’s brand of clothing, Ethan’s boots, Adrienne’s cashmere sweater that Tricia can’t stop mentioning how much she loves. These things have absolutely no relevance to the plot, the ambiance, the suspense, in fact it has the opposite effect and derails the experience. And to be clear, I do not have issues with books that have clearly feminine tones as long as they either fit with the story, characters or have a more sophisticated prose (I’ve read a surprisingly high number of romance novels and chick lit fiction novels this year unintentionally). The prose constantly tried my patience throughout the entire book (admittedly it did improve slightly as the story progressed), but the final straw for me was the constant “swoon.” McFadden kept including, written exactly like that.

I was tempted to give this a 1-star based on the prose alone, but after thinking on it, I’m bumping it up to 2.5 rounded down. The writing style and tone was not at all to my taste and the plot had more holes than a block of swiss cheese. However, the plot and crime sequence was actually very well planned if not for its complete undoing by the 1st person perspective details that undermine the entire experience. I had written a note while reading mid-way through that this book desperately needed more editing on the reading experience or some reworking of the character motives for how dirty McFadden’s writing does her own plot (a review proposed the idea of Ethan being the main protagonist instead which would’ve worked so much better in theory). There were definitely great elements here but something went really wrong when put together and I’m quite baffled at the frequently high ratings Fredia McFadden has (either that or most other readers aren’t insightful enough to notice how much of a mess this is). I can really only recommend this book to readers that either are head empty when they read or those with short attention spans as it’s quick and engrossing to read (sometimes for the wrong reasons). Instead I would recommend Riley Sager’s slower paced psychological thrillers that are just as twisty as Freida McFadden’s novels but with very tightly constructed plots and considerably better character work.