Review: LAST GIRL LIED TO By L.E. Flynn

Last Girl Lied To by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something made him angry that night.
Something made her cry.
Something made Trixie disappear.
What if it was all the same thing?

Fiona claims she doesn't remember anything about the night her best friend left a party early and walked into the ocean. But the truth is, she wishes she could forget.

Trixie's disappearance is ruled a suicide, but Fiona starts to believe that Trixie isn't really dead. Piecing together the trail of a girl who doesn't want to be found leads her to Jasper, Trixie's former friend with benefits, and Beau--the boy who turned Fiona down, who loved someone else, who might be happy Trixie is gone.

The closer Fiona gets to finding out what happened, and the closer she gets to Jasper and Beau, the more she realizes that the girl she knew better than anyone may have been a carefully constructed lie--and she might have been waiting to disappear the entire time.

Told in alternating chapters between the past and the present, Last Girl Lied To is a gripping emotional thriller.

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Last Girl Lied To is the first book by L.E Flynn that I’ve read, and I really enjoyed it. It’s a haunting read of loss and tragedy. Of mistakes and regrets. Of jealousy and dreams.

This book tells the story of Fiona as she struggles to process all her emotions around the disappearance and presumed death of her best friend Trixie. The writing is poetic in places and there are some really beautiful images inside these pages, with some absolutely killer cliffhangers. Seriously, some of the pages I just couldn’t turn fast enough!

All the characters in this book are so well written, they feel real and true, like people you could actually meet. At first, I struggled to relate to Fiona as I didn’t really understand who she was, but as I read on I realised this was an important theme in the novel—discovering who you are when you’re on your own, rather than knowing who you are depending on those you are around.

The thriller mystery part about what really happened to Trixie was tightly written with so many twists. I also loved how we only really see Trixie through Fiona’s eyes and the flashbacks, so there’s always the question of how reliable a narrator Fiona is, especially as we see how the different circumstances and situations she encounters rapidly changes her view of Trixie.

There are quite a lot of characters in this story, and many have complicated relationships. At times, I had forgotten a few of the details that were slipped into previous scenes but it was never enough that it meant I was lost. The writing was inviting and welcomed me into the story each time I sat down to continue it.

The romance in this book is well-written, and it builds naturally. I was a bit surprised by how quickly Fiona sleeps with her new boyfriend, but by the end of the book, the reason for this was clear.

The only thing I didn’t particularly like was how it was mentioned that the villain was sent to a psychiatric hospital, implying he’d committed murder because he was mad. I felt like this didn’t help some of the stigma around mental illness.

All in all, this is a fast-paced thriller and I recommend it.

A big thank you to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy of this book.