Book Review: Little Black Lies

Little Black Lies

Ever since Gone Girl, nonlinear narratives told from multiple perspectives has become so overused a literary trope, but if there is one layered, twisty thriller that genuinely threw me off by surprise, Sharon Bolton's Little Black Lies would be it. Because what's a thriller for if it gives us time to breathe? But this is not just your garden-variety whodunit, instead Bolton plays her cards close to her chest, never revealing anything more than she should, letting the reader simmer in anticipation as she unravels the psychological undercurrent that permeates through her deeply fractured characters. What's even more fascinating is that Bolton lets loose the hysteria of serial murders unfold in the picturesque Falkland Islands (an unusual setting, but one that adds to the plot's atmospheric allure), which she describes beautifully in the following lines -

"The islands are transformed by the setting of the sun. As the colours fade to monochrome, as the fine contours of the landscape melt into shadow, so the sounds and scents and textures of the land wake up. People who live in the populated parts of the world talk about the quiet, the stillness, of night. Here, when the sparse population goes to its rest, the opposite happens. Here, night-time means an endless cacophony of noise. The nesting birds... chuckle and gossip, in a constant, squabbling carpet of sound. Overhead, avian teenagers carouse in high-pitched revelry, drunk on flight and freedom. Hawks sing, penguins on the nearby shore bray at the howling of the wind, while the clifftop albatross colony might be discussing politics, so varied and intelligent seem their conversations. Beneath it all is the endless grumble and roar of the ocean."