Book Review: The Last Time I Lied

The last time Emma Davis visited Camp Nightingale, a girls-only summer camp in Upstate New York, three of her cabin mates vanished into thin air, leaving her to deal with the fallout. It's been 15 years since, but Emma, now an up-and-coming artist in New York City, is still haunted by the disappearances and unable to get over the guilt of accusing the camp owner's son, Theo, of harming her friends. When Franny, said owner, asks her to return to the camp as an art teacher, she reluctantly agrees, in part to find closure and really get into the mystery of what happened to them that fatal night. Switching back and forth in time, Riley Sager weaves a convincing tale of deceit and murder through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, even if he strains to make a workable plot out of this thin gruel that's garnished with sketchily written characters. But not is all laid to waste in The Last Time I Lied, for the author blindsides with a genuinely unexpected, and cleverly foreshadowed, climactic twist in the last few pages that throws everything revealed up to that point entirely out the window.