The Last Time I Lied

Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their tiny cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. The games ended when Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin in the dead of night. The last she--or anyone--saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips.

Now a rising star in the New York art scene, Emma turns her past into paintings--massive canvases filled with dark leaves and gnarled branches that cover ghostly shapes in white dresses. The paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the socialite and wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale. When Francesca implores her to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor, Emma sees an opportunity to try to find out what really happened to her friends.

Yet it's immediately clear that all is not right at Camp Nightingale. Already haunted by memories from fifteen years ago, Emma discovers a security camera pointed directly at her cabin, mounting mistrust from Francesca and, most disturbing of all, cryptic clues Vivian left behind about the camp's twisted origins. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing threats from both man and nature in the present.

And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale, the more she realizes it may come at a deadly price.

I loved Riley Sager’s Final Girls when I read it last year, so I knew that his follow-up would be high on my TBR.

I really liked the sound of the plot for this book, but reading it felt like not much was happening, for a long time. It’s definitely a slowwwww build! I liked the chapters jumping back and forth between past and present, and there were some good reveals, but I just didn’t feel as pulled into this as I did with Final Girls.

I was disappointed that this was pretty predictable in terms of the villain and motive. There wasn’t much that was surprising or difficult to piece together, but I liked the way some of the reveals occurred.

So as I summarized on Litsy, this was slow at first and too predictable on occasion, but in the end it really picked up and was a fun read. The Last Time I Lied was good but not great. If you’re looking for a thriller, I enjoyed Final Girls more and would recommend reading that one first.