The Night She Lied by Lucy Dawson
Genre: Psychological thriller, Suspense
Read: 29th November 2023
Published: 16th November 2023
★★★ 3.5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
Every family has secrets. Would you kill to keep yours?
It’s midnight in the hospital when Jude’s phone rings, interrupting her precious fifteen-minute break. When she sees it’s her seventy-year-old mother, Margaret, she braces herself for the usual complaints. But her blood runs cold at four words that will change everything... ‘Something terrible has happened.’
Margaret has been accused of an unspeakable crime committed twenty years ago. She insists she’s not guilty, and begs Jude to help her prove it. But as Jude is drawn into the dark secrets of her family’s past, she starts to question whether her mother is really as innocent as she claims to be.
Soon, Jude realises what happened twenty years ago is more entangled with her own life than she could ever have imagined. And as she stands face-to-face with her mother’s accuser, she knows the cost of protecting her family will be someone else’s life...
From bestselling author Lucy Dawson comes an insanely compelling page-turner perfect for anyone who tore through The Family Upstairs and Gone Girl.
MY THOUGHTS:
How far will she go to hide the truth...?
I'm not sure about the night she lied...depending on who you're talking about, they lie throughout the entire book it seems! Well, one character in particular anyway. I mean, every family have complex dynamics and hold their own secrets. But those that are facing Jude, threaten to turn her entire world on its axis.
Jude is an A&E nurse working the endless night shifts, at her behest, having lost of her partner a year before and suffering insomnia ever since. Becoming nocturnal is her way of coping. During the break of one of her shifts, she meets charasmatic Rik who is also nocturnal by choice and the two form a kind of understanding and, dare she say it, friendship. Until one night, she receives a troubling phone call from her mother prompting her to drop everything and race up to Berkshire. What awaits her is nothing short of a nightmare.
Lady Margaret Fawkes has been evicted from her lifelong home at Highcombe (Hall, Manor...I can't remember which - a big stately house at any rate), in which she had grown up as a child and spent her married life there alongside her newspaper mogul husband Benedict, at her father's and then her brother's discretion. Highcombe is entailed to pass down to the next male heir in the line and after the death of Lady Margaret's brother Anthony, the estate is then passed down to her nephew Timothy who has returned from his home in South Africa with his family to restore Highcombe and make it a working/running estate gaining income from functions and open days. Lady Margaret is appalled at the idea. But Lady Margaret has been evicted to a cottage on the estate, which is still a mansion by most people's standards...but not Lady Margaret.
When Jude arrives at Highcombe, it is to the devastating news that her mother Lady Margaret has been arrested and charged with historic sexual abuse. Jude is shocked. Her mother? This cannot be true. But there is an even bigger shock to come. And the hole that Lady Margaret pushes for Jude to dig herself just gets bigger and bigger...until she is left to flounder alone!
From the cliffhanger the prologue left us with as it then rewound a couple of years, readers know that something jawdropping is going to happen before the end. So it is expected. But is it what we expected? Or something else entirely? For me, it was a mixture of both while at the same time I didn't find it to be as earth shattering as I thought. Maybe because I knew it was coming? I don't know. At any rate, it does throw a different spin on things although right from the life-changing event happening, we knew what really happened but what everyone else got was lie after lie after lie. The shocker was Jude's cousin Timothy's testimony in court. That threw a whole new light on things. But did it change anything?
The characters are a complex bunch. I didn't really warm to Jude though I did sympathise with her. Rik, I wasn't too sure about as his appearance seemed a little too coincidental, but at first glance I liked him. But was he to be trusted? Johnnie was the poor hapless solicitor friend of the family who I found endearing. Timothy was caught in the middle of Lady Margaret's complex drama and then there was Lady Margaret herself. She was something else. A complex but completely horrible character. The way she treated everyone as if they were dirt on her shoe, the way she could take a character trait and turn it into a failing, especially when it came to her daughter, was appalling. She was a completely horrible character.
The story unfolds through the past and present, with a few flashback chapters to 1994 when the alleged abuse occurred. It is mostly told in Jude's first person narrative but also switches to the third person perspective of the cold and aloof Lady Margaret as well as detailing childhood scenes from 1994. It is quite a dark read and while it does feature child sexual abuse it is not graphic in nature and is only alluded to in part.
This is a hard book to rate. I enjoyed it for the most part but it's not one of Dawson's best. I'm not sure why. I was certainly engaged throughout though I did feel it dip a little and drag out some, but on the whole there was something missing. Maybe the characters being so unlikeable it was hard to connect with any of them though it was still an interesting read. I wanted to love this book but by the end, it did fall a little flat for me.
I would like to thank #LucyDawson, #Netgalley and #Bookouture for an ARC of #TheNightSheLied in exchange for an honest review.
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Her gripping books jump in at the deep end... the extraordinary things that can happen to ordinary couples, families and friends with devastating conclusions.
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