Ruth Ware does it again with thrilling suspense and a surprise ending.

The Lying Game, by Ruth Ware, kept me eagerly reading until I finished within a 24 hour time period. Her writing style resulted in descriptive characters, who were easy to become involved with. Thinking about my school days, I asked myself how much would I lie to protect my best friends, which is what Kate, Isa, Thea, and Fatima had to do......seventeen years after they were out of school, with lives and families of their own. At what point, after mysterious bones wash up on the shores of their old school grounds, do the girls face their pasts and decide if they can continue living with their secrets. This book is a great read, full of action and characters you care about. You will be kept guessing right up to the end.

Isa Wilde, a lawyer and new mother, has left her youthful, boarding school days behind her, but it only takes one text to bring the past into her present: I NEED YOU. That one text from Kate lures Isa back into the world of Salten and into the lying game.

The Lying Game feels less like a thriller and more like a standard mystery, a slow-to-start mystery at that. The sinister, creepy atmospheres I anticipate from Ware are diluted or missing. The descriptions and dialogue, while beautiful, feel stretched—like maybe they are pulled too far?

The boarding school flashbacks are clever—Ware really is a brilliant writer, but I don’t particularly like any of her characters. To be fair, I haven’t liked any of Ware’s protagonists. Ware is so talented at crafting flawed characters, characters I can simultaneously relate to and dislike.

Fans of Ware’s other novels will enjoy this this one, but perhaps not as much. I will definitely read her next novel even if I am a tad disappointed in The Lying Game. Props to the cover design--very appealing!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy.

Isa Wilde is happy, in a loving relationship with a new baby, finds her life turned upside down by a text message from a classmate whom she hasn't seen for 15 years--not since Isa and her 3 closest friends were expelled from their boarding school in the wake of a scandal. Now the body of the long missing father of one of the girls has been found and the friends carefully constructed version of the events surrounding the man's disappearance.

Ruth Ware has done it again. As soon as I see one of her books out I grab it up and read it in a day. This novel is about 4 young woman who met up as teenagers at a boarding school. Kate, Fatima, Thea and Isa were a very close group of girls in school harboring a great secret. I enjoyed the way the secret was slowly unraveled in layers to let us in. The relationships between the young women was very realistic. There were a number of twists and turns slowly developing among the plot to keep the reader in suspense. I would actually like Ruth Ware to write another novel with these 4 characters as I found myself very attached to them while reading the book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It had me either perplexed, or guessing the wrong outcome until the very end. A few character decisions (mostly those of Isa in relation to some situations she put her child in) seemed fairly unlikely to me, that is the only reason I would give this book 4 stars instead of 5.

Ruth Ware has done it again! If this is your first Ware book, you'll be excited and intrigued by Fatima, Kate, Thea, and Isa's high school days and their present-day lives. For fans who already love her, The Lying Game won't disappoint! When Kate's father, who doubled as their art teacher, commits suicide while they're still teenagers, the boarding school they attended made assumptions about their relationship with him in and out of school. Years later, when the four of them are living separate lives, Kate sends an ominous text that reunites them in her home (a character in its own right), and forces them to go back to the night in high school that changed their lives forever. For those who don't like gruesome mysteries or thrillers that disturb you for awhile, rest assured, this one will keep you reading but won't give you weeks of nightmares!

I guess Ware's books tend to be more of slow burns, but this one was a bit too slow for me. I think her first two were better. 2.5 stars.

This needed editing. If it were shorter and more tightly paced, I would have liked it better. As of now, it feels like a longer, more rambling version of In a Dark, Dark Wood (isolationist setting, clues in a written work, betrayal by a friend the protagonist hasn't seen in many years, and on and on). The mystery wasn't all that involving and unfolded far too slowly. I really like Ware's writing and the setting was great, but the inclusion of Isa's infant was distracting and ridiculous, and none of the characters, for as smart as they are, made any intelligent decisions. With about 50 fewer pages and about 3 fewer train rides, this wouldn't have felt as sluggish.

While this is not the big mystery that was The Girl in Cabin 10, The Lying Game was an easy read and would be perfect for a summer beach read. Isa, Fatima, Kate, and Thea are long-time school friends with a secret. If the secret gets out, their lives will be changed forever. The character development is not as rich as with Ware's previous novel. I didn't care for anyone in the novel, although narrator Isa seemed to be reliable.