This Lie Will Kill You

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This Lie Will Kill You by Chelsea Pitcher sounded like the perfect mystery. An exclusive murder mystery party that is a set up to uncover a murderer? It sounded so good! However, it just really didn't work for me. Ruby needed to be loved. Maybe it was wrong, maybe she was supposed to love herself, the rest of the world be damned, but she couldn't stop waiting to be welcomed into the universe." What do you do when you go for a summer course and find out people are dying left and right… and they all look similarly to you? Disclosure: This book was provided to me by Edelweiss free of charge in return for an honest and unbiased review. This book is scheduled to be released on December 11, 2018 by Margaret K. McElderry Books. It has it's very excellent creepy moments to give the author due, porcelain dolls and suchlike but those flashes of brilliance got lost amongst the idiotic and very uninteresting characters.

This is the start of a story that will keep you guessing. I really loved the writing style. It flowed easily for me. Characters were believable and I grew to care about what happened to them. There were a few twists in the book, some of them I saw coming and others I didn’t. It was a good mix and I found myself on the edge of my seat, excited to take in the next part of the story. Stamping a supernatural creepy modern twist on the Point Horrors of old and giving a fresh modern voice to the genre, Last One To Die is a proper suspenseful scare fest that had me hiding under the covers on more than one occasion! The romance between Tommie and Niamh was pretty sweet, though since he was a suspect on my list I just couldn’t fully enjoy it. Haha. I am still happy we do get a dash of romance, because now there was a bit of light-heartedness. Not everything was dark.

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The friendship with Jess, the family closeness and the love interest scenes were a wonderful addition to the suspense we get, like breathing a bit of fresh air as well. I loved it when scenes made me giggle or give me the butterflies. It was very light as well, which helped break the scary moments and make you believe everything was good, before another plot twist happened. Even though supernatural activity was hinted at in the book, it felt very... Scooby-Doo-esque, and quite clichéd, what with all the Ouija boards and strange prophetic dreams. I really have to ask the question of why the author felt it necessary to turn her story from the genre of mystery to the occult. Also, the rules and extents to Tommy's use of magic is just... never explained. Readers just have to accept that he's a wizard with immortality skills and he's been vibing across London for the last 150 years. No one's noticed this guy who just doesn't age and possibly living in the same manky house for who knows how long. Juniper dug her phone out of her purse. She told herself these thoughts were random, the musings of a girl who still desperately needed her morning caffeine, but deep down, she knew the truth. After everything she’d done to Ruby, she wanted to believe in the possibility of redemption.

My feelings towards this book are mixed. I didn’t like like it, but I found it amusing; the idea even though unoriginal was something I liked but the execution left a lot to be desired. The writing was trying to be poetic which was too much so it ended up being pretentious. I mean who, WHO? starts slow dancing in the middle of a school hall with a guy they see for the first time in their life? I didn’t submit you, Ruby wrote, but I’m going to the party. Maybe we can solve the mystery together?

Review

I miss her too. Juniper’s vision blurred as she thought of Ruby’s smile, Ruby’s laugh, Ruby’s touch. She pushed off from the table, her chair screeching behind her. Too bad she doesn’t miss me. The plot of the five of them being lured to this house was absurd. Taking weapons to a party with your classmates? Yeh, ok then... Like I said, it's a very familiar theme, but if it's done well, then it's done well, and I will always try to give credit where it's due. Chelsea Pitcher deserves that credit. I love a bonkers plot line and this was one. It alludes a few times to film YA horrors and I could totally see this up there with them. It was really easy to imagine this cinematically. It's quite tense as you can imagine, taking place in one evening the pace is fast going and doesn't let up from the minute they all arrive at the mansion. Each character is easily identifiable and as each reveals their innermost secrets you learn to either like them or hate them more. Blood red? The envelope leapt from her hand. It fluttered slowly, like the snowflakes falling around her, and by the time it hit the ground, she’d registered two things: This was not the letter she’d been waiting for. It was an invitation.

Now the plot. The start was alright, and it was intriguing enough to keep me reading. But towards the middle of the book, the story started to drag, and almost left the book as a DNF. I feel that the author really needed to add more layered or suspicious characters to her story, because the introduction and consequent arrest of Will was too strongly a red herring. Because of the intense suspicion thrown onto his character and the obvious dislike all the characters hold for him, I automatically dismissed him as the killer. And honestly, his sudden support and protectiveness for Niamh seemed to come out of nowhere. It was never explained why he felt it necessary to go to her apartment, or get so involved with chasing after Tommy. Him and Jess were never really shown as close in any way, so it also didn't make much sense for them all to be suddenly be working together. . Juniper started to laugh. It was the cold, brittle kind of laughter, like twigs snapping underfoot. Of course Ruby hadn’t submitted her for the scholarship. Of course Ruby wasn’t looking out for her from behind the scenes. Their friendship was over. It had been over for a long time. The characters Niamh interacts with, all have warmth and by the end of the book, personally felt like they were my friends. I trusted them, I loved them, I adored them, but should I have trusted all of them? There were bits of this book that were really well-written, with an omniscient-narrator voice, metaphors and poignant imagery. In the prologue, for example, there is an extended metaphor of a porcelain doll used to describe the narrator: Porcelain limbs couldn't tremble, and a heart made of plastic couldn't ache this terribly [...] But glass eyes could see everything.The EFFING characters. Completely unlikable! All of them. I’m sorry but I just found myself disliking each and every one of the characters. Even when it was revealed that some of them were innocent. Juniper, Gavin, and Brett are all easy to swallow and endure but Ruby and Parker were just... UGH. And don’t even get me started on Parker. Now, they realize they’ve been lured together by a person bent on revenge, a person who will stop at nothing to uncover what actually happened on that deadly night, one year ago. I thought that the characters were written beautifully and had that three dimensional element of feeling real to me. I loved Ruby. I thought she was so enthralling as a character, she was by far my favourite. The premise of this story is shaky, like they go to the house on the night of Shane’s death when it is obviously a set up. But ok let’s pretend it makes sense and they are just very gullible. The players: five students. Columbia-bound ex-valedictorian Juniper, stage-loving Ruby, golden boy Parker, school bully Brett, and outcast photographer Gavin.

I had zero clue what was going on. Characters were underdeveloped and the plot was weak. I hope to have my review up soon. The writing goes between pretty good and not so hot, but the plotting is all over the place. The bad guy was so obvious they may have well have spent the entire book smirking and twirling a moustache, the events that lead to the final confrontation, well frankly I'm not really clear on to be honest but that's possibly because I stopped paying proper attention.

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However, ultimately, the characters weren’t well developed and I did not feel a connection to any of them and the mystery element was predictable. There were very little subtleties surrounding who we should like and who we shouldn’t which meant that there could be no big reveal on who the villain was. If magic is thrown into a story, it has to either be a defining role or weaved well into the world-building so that there is a sense of believability of its place in the mystery. Otherwise, the resolution just feels lazy and unfinished.