If you are someone who spends your days living in your imagination, how do you know where your imagination ends and reality begins? Author Lucy Harper spends her days in a world of her own creation, where detective Eliza Grey solves crimes.
Since the first Eliza Grey novel several years ago, her fandom just keeps growing. So now, Lucy feels like she is on a treadmill, having to write a book a year for her fans and her publisher. Her husband, Dan, also a writer, has become a part of the Eliza Grey universe as well, working as Lucy’s manager and personal assistant, to keep the bills paid, the refrigerator full, and making sure his wife has everything she needs to keep writing.
Lucy, however, is exhausted. The book-every-year schedule has turned into a grind, leaving her bone-weary. Her writing schedule doesn’t leave her much time building friendships, so she feels isolated, Dan and Eliza being her only friends. So when Dan starts making decisions that Lucy questions or says something she thinks is unkind, she’s uncertain if she can trust her own thoughts. Maybe she’s just being overly sensitive, she wonders. I should be grateful for his help, she thinks.
But then he buys a house without talking to her. A house that’s close to where she grew up. Too close. And she’s flooded with emotions from when she was nine and her younger brother Teddy was three, and they went into the woods together late at night. She made it home shortly before dawn. Teddy never did. Lucy doesn’t remember everything that happened that night, but her best friend, her imaginary friend Eliza, may know more than she’s saying.
And then blood spots appear in the entryway to the house. Large spots, which Lucy scrubs away without telling anyone. Then Dan goes missing. His car, his beloved Jaguar bought with Lucy’s royalties, shows up abandoned and burned. And then all eyes turn toward Lucy. Could she be a killer, in those moments she spends between imagination and reality? Is it possible she’s killed again?
Gilly Macmillan’s explosive new thriller To Tell You the Truth is a compelling thriller that exposes our vulnerabilities as humans. Lack of sleep, lack of human interaction, poor nutrition, too much time spent working—all of these can make anyone feel a little crazy. They can make you feel like you’re not sure what’s real. They can make you question yourself, your family, your friends. And Macmillan uses that to perfection.
I got sucked in to To Tell You the Truth from almost the first page. Maybe this says a little too much about me and some of the jobs I’ve had, but I immediately felt for Lucy, understanding that felling of too much work and not enough self-care. And I just wanted to know more about her, to see where her story was going, to make sure she was okay in the end. I raced through this book, loving every page. Every. Page.
I highly recommend this one to anyone who loves a good thriller and needs something engrossing to get lost it for a while!
Egalleys for To Tell You the Truth were provided by William Morrow through NetGalley, with many thanks.
