Title: The Woman Who Lied
Author: Claire Douglas
Publisher: Michael Joseph
Synopsis:
Emilia Ward is just an ordinary mum living happily in suburban London with her husband and two children – a teenager from her first marriage, a little boy from her second. She also happens to be the bestselling author of the Miranda Moody detective novels.
But when Emilia embarks on her tenth novel, life takes a disturbing turn: an incident straight out of the plot of one of her novels occurs in real life. Just an unsettling coincidence, she thinks.
Until it happens again – and again.
Then someone she knows dies in the same way as a victim in the book she’s currently writing . . .
Why is someone doing this?
How do they know what she is writing?
And what if Emilia and her family are next?
My review:
The Woman Who Lied is an entertaining novel about Emilia, a writer who lives in London with her husband and kids. Her popular Detective series is about to end, as Emilia has decided to kill off the main character, but before it goes to print, creepy things start happening – and she realises they are all occurrences from her series! Things become very serious when someone she knows is killed in the same way as in one of her books! When things start to happen from her most recent, as-yet-unpublished book, she realises it must be someone she knows…
There are plenty of twists in The Woman Who Lied, which I’ve come to expect from novels by Claire Douglas, and the characters are convincing. I liked Emilia, though some of her decisions could be dubious, and the supporting characters add extra seeds of doubt for Emilia as we’re never sure who she can really trust. The story feels like it takes a bit longer to get into than her other books, but I think that only builds the tension which ramps up as Emilia starts to suspect everyone around her, and I loved the element of a book within a book.
I enjoyed The Woman Who Lied – it’s a solid, tightly-plotted thriller and I would expect no less from this author.
My rating: 4/5
Many thanks to Michael Joseph for providing a copy of this book on which I chose to write an honest review.