My Secret Lies With You blog tour – Faye's Favourite Mysteries

I'm a huge fan of Faye's tense, intriguing books, so it's lovely to share one of Faye's favourite YA mystery novels as part of the blog tour. You can check out my review of My Secret Lies With You here.

Lying About Last Summer

What I loved about this book was that we were in one location for a short period of time and we weren’t sure, once we got there, who we should trust. A tragic past event takes us into the world of the book; Skye’s parents now are sending her to a camp for bereaved teens after the death of her sister. We go with Skye there. 

In many ways this story has all the makings of a classic Agatha Christie mystery in its set up. And what I loved about it was the ending, which for me, felt like the gift that kept on giving. I can’t say too much about it here because I don’t want to create spoilers, but clearly endings are completely crucial to the success or not of a mystery story. The end of a mystery needs to be satisfying – it needs to answer all the questions that the reader has asked as they’ve read – and it also needs to be credible, authentic to what has happened to get us to this point. As a reader we look for resolution in a way that continues to sit well with the characters we’ve got to know. We hope for a resolution that still might, in some way, surprise us. But we don’t want the surprise to be so outrageous as to be ridiculous or so slight as to be disappointing. Endings need to deliver on the built up tension. They need to entertain. 

For the writer this can be a hard thing to achieve – it requires a specific graft to deliver a conclusion that does all of these things – and I felt that Sue Wallman delivered it perfectly in Lying About Last Summer. In lots of ways the ending crept up on me. I was aware of building tensions between characters throughout the story, but because I was so intent on the resolution to the main mystery, and because I was so immersed in its conclusion, I didn’t anticipate the ending would unfold quite as it did. Here was a real finale! There was danger, in fact there was proper peril – I really felt it – and then as the danger subsided an internal resolution emerged. For me this was a thrilling and satisfying ending brilliantly done and I loved it! I’m looking forward to Sue’s new book, Dead Popular, which is due out in August 2019.

I agree, Faye – Lying About Last Summer is a great mystery with a memorable ending. Thank you for sharing one of your favourite mysteries Faye!

My Secret Lies With You is out now.