Book Review: Behind Every Lie | Christina McDonald

Christina McDonald’s The Night Olivia Fell was that wonderful mix of suspense, emotion, and heart. In Behind Every Lie, a woman wakes up in the hospital to a horrifying truth and no memories of how it happened.

About the Book

Eva Hansen wakes in the hospital after being struck by lightning and discovers her mother, Kat, has been murdered. Eva was found unconscious down the street. She can’t remember what happened but the police are highly suspicious of her.

Determined to clear her name, Eva heads from Seattle to London—Kat’s former home—for answers. But as she unravels her mother’s carefully held secrets, Eva soon realizes that someone doesn’t want her to know the truth. And with violent memories beginning to emerge, Eva doesn’t know who to trust. Least of all herself.

Told in alternating perspectives from Eva’s search for answers and Kat’s mysterious past, Christina McDonald has crafted another “complex, emotionally intense” (Publishers Weekly) domestic thriller. Behind Every Lie explores the complicated nature of mother-daughter relationships, family trauma, and the danger behind long-held secrets.

Review

These memory gap books really play with our minds, don’t they? We know from the beginning that the narrator is unreliable. Even more terrifying, the narrator knows they aren’t reliable. In the case of Eva, she’s awoken in a nightmare scenario. She’s not only learned she lost her mother, but also that she’s the prime suspect. How do you prove you’re innocent if you can’t remember anything?

“I couldn’t trust anything. Not what I remembered, not what I thought I saw, not myself.”

The book opens with Eva, her mother Kat, her brother Andrew, and her mother’s best friend Lily gathered to celebrate Kat, who won an award for saving a child’s life. That celebration is the last thing Eva remembers before she awakes in the hospital to learn she has been struck by lightning.

Eva has a secret that she has been keeping, and she worries about her boyfriend Liam finding out the truth of what happened four years earlier. Eva has isolated herself and overly accommodates Liam. Eva has become submissive, compliant, and lacks a voice in her own relationship. She sees Liam as a nurturer, taking care of her and making her feel safe.

In the present, Eva awakes to the news that her mother was stabbed multiple times. Eva has no memory of what happened before she was struck by lightning, but she has plenty of memories that show the reader the troubled relationship with her mother. Text messages reveal why she was at her mother’s home the night she was murdered, and why she is the primary suspect. But how can she prove she’s innocent if she doesn’t know what happened?

A letter from her mother explains some of the truth about why Kat kept so many secrets from Eva. But if Eva wants to find out what happened and prove she didn’t murder her mother, she’ll need to learn the full truth. As the murder investigation is ongoing, Eva flies to London where her mother lived years ago to find answers. She won’t let herself get blamed for something she didn’t do. Not again…

“A memory is no more reliable than the weather, broken, warped by the teller’s view.”

The story is told through Eva’s POV in the present, and Kat’s POV twenty-five years earlier. McDonald brings the impeccable and emotional storytelling that readers fell in love with in The Night Olivia Fell. McDonald boldly confronts troubling and heavy themes with the respect they deserve. Some of these themes may be triggering for some readers, so look up content warnings if you are worried about it.

The revelations that come out at the climax of the story are shocking and powerful. The sheer number of them coming in quick succession is nearly overwhelming, not unlike memories suddenly coming back all at once. Twists and turns deliver a gripping story that you won’t want to stop reading.

McDonald writes with compassion for her characters and an elegance in her plotting and execution. Eva’s piecing together fragments of memory and family secrets mirrors her work as a potter and her use of kintsugi—the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold. This elegant and ancient technique not only creates beautiful work out of what was one broken, but it also celebrates the damage rather than hides it. A fitting metaphor for Eva’s growth arc across this novel.

Thank you to Gallery Books for my copy. Opinions are my own.