Hello Beautiful People! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I continue on my Freida McFadden trend and check out another one of her mystery thrillers. In Never Lie by Freida McFadden we follow a newlywed couple who get snowed into a secluded house that they come to look at in the hopes of potentially starting their family there. What they don’t expect however is the thousands of secrets hidden within the walls of this home, and how being snowed in here might not be so serene after all.
Main Characters:
- Dr. Adrienne Hale: The old owner of the home Trisha and Ethan are snowed into, was a well-known Psychiatrist before her disappearance who had some interesting clients, was known to tape all of her client sessions it’s just that she kept them hidden somewhere in her home that no one would know
- Trisha: Young Newley wed who is desperate to keep her husband impressed and interested, has some insecurities that she struggles to deal with, when snowed into this abandoned home with her husband finds the old owner audio tapes and listens to the mystery of what happened to the old owner unfold
- Ethan: Trisha’s husband who has a bit of a brighter perspective than she does, inherited some money after his parents passing which led to him being able to buy him and Trisha the house
- EJ: Dr. Hale gives past perspectives throughout the book and we start to learn about a client named EJ who was giving her a really hard time
- Luke: Dr. Hale’s boyfriend who was in a relationship with her at the time she went missing
My Review
I’ve checked out quite a few of Freida McFadden’s books at this point and I have to say I have yet to learn my lesson that whoever you think is behind the mystery in her books, just assume that you’re wrong. Her ability to create dynamic twists in her mysteries with basic plots and few characters is amazing, and Never Lie was no exception. I didn’t enjoy Never Lie as much as some of the other books of hers I’ve read in the past but take that with a grain of salt because it’s like trying to hold up something very good to something else that’s also very good. Never Lie was a really enjoyable read and I crushed it out in a day because I just didn’t want to put it down once I started. With what originally seems to be a basic setting and basic characters, we come to quickly see that there is always more below the surface.
I gave Never Lie by Freida McFadden an 8/10 rating. I was a little skeptical as the book started because everything seemed so disconnected but as soon as it started to come together, and the book really started to pick up I really dug into it. I was originally a little bored with the main characters Trisha and Ethan. Don’t get me wrong you start to get connected with them more throughout the book, but at first, they just seemed a bit meh to me. Trisha and Ethan are a newley wed couple who are just hell-bent on creating this perfect life with one another for one another. Their relationship seemed to move really quickly and you can tell early on that even though they are married they are still learning each other. Trisha was a bit cringe at first just desperate to have Ethan think she is the greatest person on the planet. She does things going against what she wants in the hopes that it will make Ethan happy, like visiting this house in the middle of nowhere to appease his want to live there. Ethan and Trisha come to visit the abandoned house of Dr. Adrienne Hale, a psychiatrist who went missing years ago and was never found. Since her disappearance, her secluded home in the woods has been left untouched. Out in her home is where she conducted her therapy appointments, and it becomes clear that she has a lot of difficult clients. After getting snowed in at the house Ethan and Trisha nose around and find that Dr. Hale’s disappearance may not really be that much of a mystery after all.
The book jumps from the differing perspectives of Trisha and Dr. Hale throughout. Trisha gives us present perspectives that are intertwined with Dr. Hale’s therapy tapes from the past and Dr. Hale’s own personal experience from the past. We can assume when it comes to the tapes that those are the ones that Trisha is listening to after she finds the secret hidden room in the home stacked with them. Unable to help herself Trisha starts to listen to the tapes and starts to realize that one of the people on these tapes may be responsible for her disappearance. Freida often does this in her books that have past and present perspectives where she finds a way to almost weave them in seamlessly. When a character in the present wonders something or does something someone from the past goes into it as well. I just always enjoy this because it often makes you wonder which character is telling the truth, or I guess if any of them are. The book ultimately revolves around Trisha trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to the doctor through the tapes while Adrienne gives us her side of the story.
I really enjoyed the way the mystery played out and I thought while the ending was just a touch unsatisfying for specific reasons everything wrapped up really interestingly. If you’re in the mood for a mind-twisting mystery I would definitely recommend checking this one out. With a creepy house in the still snow, and characters looking to keep themselves busy in a house of secrets it keeps the reader pulled into what’s coming next the whole time. If you’ve read other of Freida’s other books and enjoyed them you will for sure like this one as well.
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to see any spoilers***
As Trisha and Ethan spend time in the house it becomes clear to Trisha that the mystery behind who killed Dr. Hale is in her therapy session tapes. Obsessively listening to them Trisha learns that Dr. Hale had a patient named EJ who was causing her a lot of issues. EJ had a compromising video of the doctor and was actively blackmailing her with it. For a while I had 100% thought I had cracked the case and that EJ was actually Ethan and that’s why he was so obsessed with moving into Dr. Hale’s house. He was always obsessed with her. Ethan was acting suspicious so I fully thought it was him and that I was so smart. Oh, I was so wrong.
Turns out Ethan did have a connection to the doctor’s house, but it’s not because he killed her, it’s because he has his own very different secrets in the tapes. Ethan has some wealth because his mother died unexpectedly years before. Turns out his mother was one of Dr. Hale’s patients, and she had shared her fears of her son with the doctor. So Ethan wasn’t a patient of hers, but the person who could blow up his life was. Turns out that Ethan did kill his other to get her inheritance, so her worries about her son were right. So Ethan did some killing, just not to the doctor. I thought for a minute that maybe he killed the doctor to try and destroy her notes on his mother, but that really wasn’t ever the case. He was hoping to find any notes on his mother and destroy them, but he also just liked the house too.
Alright so Ethan isn’t EJ, so what the hell happened to Dr. Hale? Well turns out along with the video EJ had with the doctor Adrienne isn’t exactly the best person. She had a weird relationship with a woman she counselled in which she knew she was lying to her, but let her, and then would kind of call her out on it just so that the client knew she was lying. The client was named Patricia and it turned out that knowing her secrets would help the doctor out when it came to her EJ issue. I feel like if I thought that Ethan was EJ I should have figured this out, I was kicking myself. Patricia = Trisha, who would have thought. When Dr. Hale black male Patricia she gets her to drug EJ and get him to Hale’s home where she could then deal with the issue. Dr. Hale kills EJ and hides him below her home.
Turns out though that bringing her other client into this issue would be her biggest mistake of all. Worrying that Dr. Hale would continue to blackmail her, Patricia kills her and dumps her body. She tries to find EJ’s body so that his death can never be connected to her but never finds him. While the whole time it seemed like coming to visit this house was Ethan’s idea, turns out Trisha was the real mastermind behind it all the whole time. Hoping to find EJ’s body so she can really move on with Ethan she finds exactly what she’s looking for. What she didn’t anticipate however is that Dr. Hale’s boyfriend was squatting in the house and would become a further issue for them. Trisha and Ethan eventually end up having to admit to each other their pasts and that they are both horrible people but it’s okay because at least they are both horrible I guess. I mean the two end up building a terrible codependency relationship once the truth is out and they just feed into each other’s bad behaviours.
They end up killing Luke to hide all of their secrets, and to further hide it move into Dr. Hales’s home. How creepy. I mean I guess there’s someone out there for everyone it just left a bad feeling in me that they got away with everything and just got to live their happily ever after together. Trisha shares that she thought for a while Ethan was going to break after killing Luke but he came around and now everything is all good with them, just living in a house where multiple people have been murdered.
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