First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

Amy  

mystery

Evie just moved in with her boyfriend who is a wealthy inheritor in small-town Louisiana. His friends are very curious about her. It turns out, they have good reason to be curious because Evie is not who she claims to be. In fact, the more that is revealed about her past, the more Evie’s situation is quite remarkable.

First Lie Wins had me in its grips for the first half. I really liked the way Ashley Elston built the story so that it started off as one thing and then she slowly built a fuller picture. I liked the way the flashbacks informed the reader.

However, around the halfway mark, a new character was suddenly introduced who seemed extremely unlikely. The descriptions of how Evie and this person met and formed a “team” was not robust. Their backstory lacked sufficient detail to make me believe it. His existence was just too sudden and left me feeling like it was at this point in the story when Elston didn’t know how to continue, so she taped a branch on her story tree instead of making a new branch grow naturally. This character’s existence took me out of the story and greatly lessened my enjoyment of the book. Because, after that point, I started noticing all the things I perceived as flaws in the story instead of just enjoying the thrills and skillz the author was trying to highlight.

For example, I found it really hard to believe that Evie’s own past had prepared her in any way to take on some of the challenges and roles in which she, supposedly, excelled.  I can’t specify without giving things away. But let’s just say people go to college to be successful at things for which she just seemed to have natural ability or could quickly learn on the Internet. Ridiculous. I do, normally, enjoy a good antihero. But Evie just felt unbelievable, sadly.

The narrator, Saskia Maarleveld, was awesome. My usual complaint is with her “narrator voice”. But since this story is all told from the protagonist’s point of view, she never had to read from a narrator’s viewpoint. Her voice acting and vocal repertoire were awesome! A+ because I see no reason to dock her for anything on this one.