Review: Dangerous Lies by Becca Fitzpatrick

Dangerous Lies by Becca Fitzpatrick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A teen is forced to make a fresh start after witnessing a violent crime—but love and danger find her anyway in this novel from Becca Fitzpatrick, the New York Times bestselling author of the Hush, Hush saga.

Stella Gordon is not her real name. Thunder Basin, Nebraska, is not her real home. This is not her real life.

After witnessing a lethal crime, Stella Gordon is sent to the middle of nowhere for her own safety before she testifies against the man she saw kill her mother’s drug dealer.

But Stella was about to start her senior year with the boyfriend she loves. How can she be pulled away from the only life she knows and expected to start a new one in Nebraska? Stella chafes at her protection and is rude to everyone she meets. She’s not planning on staying long, so why be friendly? Then she meets Chet Falconer and it becomes harder to keep her guard up, even as her guilt about having to lie to him grows.

As Stella starts to feel safer, the real threat to her life increases—because her enemies are actually closer than she thinks…

Ah, this book was soooo good--I'm writing this review straight off having finished it, and I'm filled with *all* the feels.

Fitzpatrick delivers believable characters, a plot full of action, and a romance that just leaps off the page. Chet was so real, and I loved that he had a dark past. It provided a nice parallel to Stella's past too--and wow, Stella's secrets are huge! There are so many plot twists that I just did not see coming.

Yet, there are a couple of things that made me give this book four stars instead of five. Firstly--and this is the biggest one for me--one of the off-page characters who has fibromyalgia is reported to be a drug addict because of her pain. As someone with a chronic illness myself (and I know people with fibromyalgia), this really annoyed me. I couldn't help but feel Fitzpatrick was sending out the wrong message here, suggesting that all fibromyalgia sufferers are drug addicts. Which is so not the case, and quite a damaging message. I suppose, in a way, Fitzpatrick's apparent message of fibro-sufferers being addicts could be discredited however, as the character who reports this is later shown to be unreliable--and this is shown in a great plot twist. Still, even then, I wasn't really sure whether Fitzpatrick was enforcing that view or not.

The other thing that I didn't particularly like was the beginning of the book. I found it to be unusually slow in pace--compared to Fitzpatrick's other books--and I just didn't like the main character, Stella. she was so unlikeable and annoying in those opening chapters, and I was disappointed, wondering how on earth I was going to keep reading...

But I did, and I am *so* glad. Stella became more likeable, and we really delved into the psyches of the other characters. The plot ramped up its tension, and the author proved that she really is a master of the thriller.

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