Monthly Archives: August 2025

Count My Lies – Sophie Stava

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Time is running out on my summer break; I head back to my classroom on August 25. So it’s back-to-back thrillers for me.

Sloane Caraway is a compulsive liar. Always has been from the time she was a kid and when her life (single mom, constant moves) didn’t suit her, she just made up a better version for herself. Now she’s in her early 30s living in a two bedroom apartment with her mom in Brooklyn, working as a nail technician. One day in the park, she rushes to the aid of a father whose daughter has been stung by a bee. She starts by telling the father, Jay Lockhart, that she’s a nurse. Then, she adeptly handles the crisis, earning the father’s gratitude. When he asks her name, she lies about that, too.

The first part of Sophie Stava’s debut, Count My Lies, follows Sloane as she finds herself pulled into the Lockhart’s orbit. Jay’s wife, Violet, is perfect and Sloane finds herself wanting to be like her. Their daughter, Harper, it turns out, is in need of a nanny and suddenly Sloane finds herself with a new job and, she hopes, a new friend.

But, of course, things are not as they seem. Sloane outs herself as unreliable from the get go, but about half way through, the book switches perspectives and we find ourselves seeing things from Violet’s point of view. It turns out, Violet is lying, too.

Count My Lies isn’t exactly original, but let’s face it — with so many domestic thrillers on the market these days, you’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t remind you of something else. I don’t think my issues with this book have anything to do with the plot, I mostly just didn’t care about the characters. I think we’re supposed to like Sloane and Violet, but I didn’t really understand what motivated either of them. Well, we’re told why Violet makes the choices she does, but none of it felt real. By the time we get to her part in the story, the narrative feels more like plot points being clicked together like Lego pieces.

As for Jay, he gets his own section of the book too, but generally he is a non-entity – just a dude who is “handsome in an obvious, teenage heartthrob sort of way.”

Look – if you don’t read a ton of thrillers, you would probably have a good time with this book. It was just okay for me.

Don’t Let Him In – Lisa Jewell

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Pretty much any book by British author Lisa Jewell is a guaranteed slump buster. While I haven’t always loved every book I’ve read (and I’ve read several: None of This is True, The Family Remains, The Night She Disappeared, Invisible Girl, The Family Upstairs, Watching You, I Found You, The Girls in the Garden), every single one of them has been an entertaining, fast-paced read. Jewell’s latest novel, Don’t Let Him In, is no exception.

Ash Swann’s life has taken a bit of a turn. Her father has recently died, she’s had a bit of trouble at work, and she’s moved back home to recover from both of these traumatic events. That’s when Nick Radcliffe enters her life– well, her mother’s life. He reaches out to the Swanns after her father’s death and before you can say “to good to be true” he has insinuated himself into their lives.

Martha and her husband Alistair live a quiet life with their three children. Martha has a thriving florist business, and Al has a busy job in the hospitality industry where “Sometimes he’s home all the time, other times they call him in at the last minute and he’s away for days.” Martha forgives him time and again because she never imagined that as a forty-four-year-old divorcee she’d meet someone like Al.

There’s a third voice in the book, this one belonging to a male character and set four years in the past. He’s very forthcoming about his marriage to an older woman, Tara, whose adult children disapproved of the union. Tara’s daughter, Emma,

doesn’t like me at all. Neither of Tara’s children does. I don’t care too much about that. I can’t say I particularly like them either. I don’t need to like them, and they don’t need to like me. The most important thing, the key to everything, is that my wife trusts me. And she does. Implicitly.

Careful readers will have no trouble figuring out how these three separate narratives and timelines connect. The fun in this story is really in watching women band together – spearheaded by Ash – to out a snake in the grass. Does it strain credulity? Yes. Did that matter? No. Don’t Let Him In is a fun time and I gobbled it up in just a couple sittings.

The Outside of August – Joanna Hershon

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Plucked from my TBR shelf, Joanna Hershon’s 2003 novel The Outside of August concerns siblings Alice and August and their fraught relationship with their seemingly free-spirited mother, Charlotte. The story starts when Alice is a kid, Gus a couple years older. Alice spends all her time waiting for her mother to come home, or if she is home, to acknowledge her in any way.

Alice was ten years old and she still couldn’t figure out what her mother did with her days. Charlotte hadn’t gone anywhere since mid-January, when she’d left for a month while the children were at school, having said good-bye only in passing, as they were headed out the door.

The novel propels us through the siblings’ adolescence until an event separates them, only bringing them back together many years later before separating them again. Alice feels that Gus knows something that he isn’t telling her, and after a late-night call from his wife, Cady, Alice hops a plane and heads to Mexico where Gus is squatting and surfing.

Sadly, I do not have unlimited shelf space, so when I finish a book I have to make the decision of where to house it. Will it go on my finished shelf or will I give it away? It used to be that I gave nothing away – even the books I didn’t really like. Even books that don’t really float my boat have something to offer, and if I actually finish it then that’s something, right? I am way better at DNFing now than I used to be. That might have something to do with the mountain of books in my physical tbr pile.

I didn’t actively dislike The Outside of August. I thought a lot of the writing was really lovely, but I also thought that the story was slow and meandering and when Alice arrived in Mexico the narrative felt disjointed and feverish – although maybe that was the point. The “secret” Alice felt August was keeping from her was revealed via a letter from their mother and it felt a little bit like a cheat – also unexamined, really, by either sibling. I know, life sometimes happens that way, but I didn’t feel emotionally satisfied when I finally finished my time with these characters.

This one will go in the donate pile.

The House of Ashes – Stuart Neville

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When Sara and her husband Damien move into their new house in Northern Ireland, she almost immediately begins to feel uneasy. For one thing, there’s a stain on the flagstone in the kitchen that no amount of scrubbing seems to remedy. For another, a strange woman shows up one morning and yells at Sara to get out of her house. As if this weren’t disconcerting enough, Damien is clearly controlling and emotionally abusive and it’s clear that he’s gaslighting Sara.

Stuart Neville’s novel The House of Ashes unspools the story of the horrific history of “The Ashes” (as the house is called) in several different voices. There’s Sara’s, of course, but there are other voices too, including Mary, a little girl who lived at the house sixty years ago, and Esther, another girl who comes to The Ashes. It is clear early on that The Ashes is not a happy place. Mary says

I always lived in the house. I never knew any different. Underneath, in the room down the stairs. In the dark. That’s what I remember most, when we were telt to put the lamps out. They locked the door at the top of the stairs and that was that. Dark until they opened it again. I still don’t like the dark.

Neville’s book is about abuse. Sara’s husband is abusive – the kind of domestic abuse that might be familiar to modern day audiences, abuse that is couched as a love so deep the person just can’t help themselves. The abuse at The Ashes in Mary’s story is something completely different. Mary and Mummy Joy and Mummy Noreen are at the mercy of the Daddies: Ivan, Tam, and George. Although many of the details are spared, your imagination will have no trouble filling in the blanks.

As Sara digs deeper into the dark secrets of The Ashes, she also finds her own voice, and it all makes for a compelling read.

This Book Will Bury Me – Ashley Winstead

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On the plus side, Ashley Winstead’s latest novel This Book will Bury Me is a page turner. On the negative side, the book doesn’t hang together and I didn’t finish it feeling satisfied. This is the fourth book I have read by this author. I had similar feelings about her debut, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, and then I really liked The Last Housewife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour.

Janeway Sharp, a college student, receives horrible news: her father has died. She returns home to be with her mother and try to process this unexpected and devastating loss. She doesn’t quite know how to manage her grief and then one night she stumbles upon an online group of armchair true crime detectives and gets sucked down the rabbit hole.

Soon she is helping a small group of people (Mistress, Citizen, Lightly, and Goku) solve a murder, an activity that provides both satisfaction and distraction. Jane earns the title of “savant” because she can apparently see things/details that others miss. That’s lucky for her, I guess.

When a terrible crime takes place in Idaho, the group immediately jumps on it, eventually deciding to meet up there so they can be boots on the ground. Lightly, a former cop, has a connection in the FBI and suddenly they find themselves special consultants. If Idaho seems like a very specific place for a murder, that’s because this case is essentially the Idaho college murders which took the lives of four students and for which Bryan Kohberger was recently sentenced to life without parole.

Suddenly Jane finds herself sharing a house with people she had only known online and they become a family of sorts — just a family with a shared true crime obsession. They follow the clues, turn over rocks, and insinuate themselves into the lives of people connected to the case. All of this is ethically grey, of course, but Jane isn’t so naive as to not realize it is. Still, she’s determined to find out what happened.

The book is not without its controversy because of its similarity to the Idaho murders. All of this makes for a quick narrative and I didn’t really have a problem with it. My issues had more to do with the subplot of Jane’s father. Jane decides to do some digging, to find out about the person she felt the closest to, but whom she doesn’t feel she knows anything about. There were some things about her father that were revealed that didn’t really go anywhere and felt more like a distraction than a meaningful part of the novel’s narrative.

I also questioned some of the things that happened at the end of the book, as the narrative wrapped up. It seemed sort of implausible to me and left me feeling sort of meh about the whole thing when all was said and done.

Still, for anyone who has ever found a community online, or true crime junkies – you’d probably enjoy this book.