This is an atmospheric and eerie psychological thriller from Ruth Ware. Take four teenage schoolfriends who set up a group that vies to create the most outlandish lies that they can get others to believe, and what you have is a recipe for potentially horrifying outcomes. This is exactly what the author does, creating two time lines when something terrible happens that results in the four girls being expelled from their school, although this does not stop them from lying. Their one proviso is that they must tell the truth to one another, however, when you specialise in lying, that may be a bit of a tall order. In the present, the four friends have not seen each other in years. Isa is now a 32 year old lawyer, with a partner, Owen, and baby daughter, Freya, she is a woman with everything to lose. She gets a text from Kate saying that she needs her. The narrative is delivered from Isa's perspective, filling us in on their past and what is now happening in the present.

Isa rushes to Kate, and they are joined by Thea and Fatima, they are tense and disturbed at the possibility that the secret that they have kept for seventeen years is about to emerge. We are slowly taken back to their schooldays at Salten, a boarding school. We see their relationships build, and how their group was set up. Their Lying Game, which seemed so much fun at the time, creates divisions and isolates others, and the locals are none too happy either. Then the awful event occurs and they lie their way through that. Are their secrets from the past now set to emerge? This is a beautifully written novel with both suspense and twists. However, whilst we do get a clear idea of the characters of Kate and Isa, we are left more in the dark about Thea and Fatima, which is a shame. A great read that focuses on the issues of love, deception, trust and relationships. However, whilst I derived enjoyment from reading it, it did have too many strong echoes of her book, In a Dark Dark Wood. I hope the author does not keep repeating the same motifs in her future books and finds new territory to explore. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.

I am afraid this book was a bit of a slog for me. It just too slow and convoluted not up to her usual standard and therefore a disappointment.

As a male reader, I found this book very hard to identify with. It all seemed just so implausible and I didn't take to any of the characters. Probably just a man thing.
I loved Ms Ware's previous books but this was average. For me it was too long and drawn out. Would have been much better as a short story. The last 10% or so was very dramatic but it was hard getting there.
The story is told in the present tense by one of the four leading woman. Why do so many female writers use the present tense? It really puts me off reading a number of books I would otherwise love to read.
All in all, not a bad book but not a great one. The worst of Ms Ware's books so far. If her next is written in the present tense I'll probably give it a miss.

Fantastic fast paced thriller. Clever twists and turns that keep you guessing throughout.

Teenage girls and their loyalty to one another is perfectly portrayed.

Another cracker from Ware!

I'm a big fan of this author. I couldn't put this book down. A gripping read!

I started out excited to read this new novel by Ruth Ware, but unfortunately I quickly became bored by it. The story of four old friends, secrets and lies seemed to me like Ms. Ware's first book! Not quite tense enough for me.

Thank you Netgalley for my copy.

Having read In a dark, dark wood, I was interested to see how The lying game compared, and am happy to say that Ruth Ware has delivered another good thriller with a twist. As with In a dark, dark wood, The lying game deals with female friendships. The narrative is told from Isa Wilde's perspective who has been living a lie all of her adult life and now that lie has resurfaced.....Isa must return to where the lie began.

Ware has captured how intense teen friendships can be, the emotions that bond people together. As the tension builds, we see the stress and strain placed upon Isa as a new mother. Entertaining.

I loved Ruth Wares first book and enjoyed her second so I was really looking forward to The Lying Game. It didn't quite love up to expectations for me unfortunately. I really wanted to love it but it just didn't work. I don't mind a slow burner but this was just too slow for me and I didn't connect enough with any of the characters to really care much about what happened to them. I read to the end to discover the big secret but it didn't really create enough of a surprise for me.

I do love Ruth Wares writing style so will definitely look out for her next book but I was so disappointed that I didn't enjoy this one more.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishers for this review copy.

Kate sends a 3 word text to her three best friends Isa, Thea and Fatima, that she has known from boarding school – just a simple ‘I Need You’. They all drop everything they are doing and go down to Kate, to a place that they haven’t been to in many years. Not since the day when their big secret happened, the apparent consequence of a schoolgirl game – The Lying Game – where it gave them a reputation amongst the school for making up stories, whether good or bad. Kate won’t revealed why she needs them until they are all together, and then proceeds to shatter a secret that they’ve all managed to keep for 17 years.

I was excited to start this book. I have read the author’s previous two books, In a Dark Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10, and enjoyed them. The book begins promising, with Isa receiving a text from Kate. She and her young baby head off to Salten, where Isa had boarded many years before. There, one by one, her best friends arrive and listen to what Kate has to say. I won’t reveal anymore as to what this is for fear of spoilers, but needless to say, a big secret that was covered up 17 years before is on the verge of being discovered and this sends panic through the friends. This is where, for me, the book starts to slow up. I found the middle part of the book a bit slow, and to be honest started to get a bit bored with it. I didn’t really like how it flitted between present day and 17 years before, and didn’t feel that some of the storylines were explained well – I didn’t feel we had enough of many of the other characters. As the story goes on, you understand who the body is (this isn’t really a spoiler as it’s told quite early on), but you don’t know the reasoning behind the death.

It wasn’t until the last 20% of the book where the storyline picked up again and I began to enjoy it. It wasn’t a bad book, but I did struggle through some of it! Would I recommend it? – yes, of course I would, but be warned that it’s not a fast paced thriller and if that’s your kind of thing then this may not be the book for you!

3.5 stars!

If you've read Ware's 'In A Dark, Dark Wood', then you'll recognise that the essence of the plot here is exactly the same: a group of girls were once close friends, something horrible happened, they went their separate ways and are brought back together again 17 years later; the horrible thing resurfaces, the truth is uncovered. Once again, too, we're in an unusual location, here a dilapidated mill which is sinking under the encroachment of water. What this book lacks, though, that the first one did so well, is characters with individual voices and a sense of humour. With those qualities lacking, this turns into a generic melodrama that lacks credibility.

This supposedly tight-knit group turn out to have known each other for less than a year (they're 15 when they meet, haven't turned 16 when the horrible thing happens and they're separated, and despite not having seen each other for 17 years, when one of them texts the others they instantly drop jobs, family, life to meet up - heck, my friends can't even arrange drinks in the pub without military-style planning!

Add to that a boring narrator obsessed with how many times a day she has to feed her screaming baby (surely important in real life, duller than dull to read about), characters who are thin stereotypes (the artistic one, the Muslim one, the anorexic one), a plot involving sinister locals and a desperate last-minute 'twist'.

It's a shame as Ware writes more fluently than many commercial authors in this genre but it seems that here she's just re-writing her first success without the elements which made it work: 2.5 stars for a fast, commute read which I was glad to finish.

There is no friendship as intense as when you’re fifteen. Isa, Thea, Fatima and Kate were inseparable at boarding school, a tight closed unit, invincible in the company of each other. At first their game seemed like innocent fun – the Lying Game, invented by Kate and Thea to prove that they could get away with anything, make people believe what they wanted them to. Until it went too far and was no longer a game. Seventeen years later, one lie is still haunting them, threatening to destroy their lives ....

Netgalley has come through for me again, with another fantastic read – The Lying Game, by Ruth Ware. After really enjoying The Woman in Cabin 10, this book has been on my wishlist ever since I spotted it on Goodreads. I’m glad to say my little happy dance on receiving an ARC was fully warranted! Within the first two pages, the author had set a scene so vivid, and so compelling, that I was hooked instantly. I love mysteries which take you on armchair travel trips to mysterious locations, and although the small fishing village of Salten is not on any “real” maps, I could picture it so clearly that I feel I have been there: an old tidal mill house on a deserted sand spit, crumbling away into a hungry sea. Delicious!

Apart from the location, the premise of the story holds its own unique pull. Four women, who had been inseparable friends when they were fifteen, reunite after seventeen years. What has kept them apart for so long? And what is the terrible secret that still holds such power over them after all this time that they will drop everything and rush to a friend’s aid when she asks them to? I was duly intrigued, loving the main protagonist Isa’s flashbacks to the time the four girls attended boarding school together. And if you haven’t had enough classic British scenery yet, the boarding school, Salten House, is like a mixture of Hogwarts and Malory Towers. My inner child was delighted – who can resist a good boarding school story, even as an adult? I felt a certain sense of longing reading about the teenagers’ friendship – you never quite feel the same intensity of loyalty again that consumed you at fifteen, when your friends were your whole universe.

To cut a long ramble short, the book had all the elements to make for a riveting, irresistible mystery. And Ruth Ware does it so well! With her ability to create a tense atmospheric setting and highly strung, somewhat neurotic characters who drive the story with an urgency lacking in other protagonists, the book had me enthralled from beginning to end. Each women brings with her a unique and diverse element that makes this bunch of friends very interesting indeed – and even though this book did not need a “twist you will never see coming” to make it memorable, it had a few surprises in store. Whilst this is a slow-burning, heavily character driven story, there is a constant undercurrent of tension and melancholic longing running through the storyline that made this an extremely compelling read. If anything, I would have loved to find out more about that endless happy summer the four girls spent at Salten, and their individual lives. I was sad when it ended!

The Lying Game is a slow, character driven mystery in an atmospheric setting that had me hooked from start to finish. I loved it! With her ability to present interesting characters in a tense and atmospheric setting, Ruth Ware is quickly making her way onto my favourite authors list, and I will be eagerly looking out for future mysteries from this talented writer.

A short message Isa Wilde had hoped would never come. „I need you “, is all it says. The young mother knows exactly who sent it, even without giving a name. It comes from the past, from the time, 15 years ago, when she was at Salton House, a boarding house for girls. Isa, Kate, Thea and Fatima were best friends in their short time together and an incident has bond them for life. Even if they haven’t seen each other since then, they know they cannot escape it. Isa has to go back, she cannot tell her husband the truth, because this would mean risking their life. She only takes her six-months-old daughter Freya with her and heads to confront the past. When the now women are reunited, Kate tells the others what has happened: bones have been found and their well-kept secret is threatened to surface after all these years.

“The Lying Game” is a game the four girls played when they were at school. They had five rules which function as titles for the chapters:
1) Tell a lie;
2) Stick to your story;
3) Don’t get caught;
4) Never lie to each other;
5) Know when to stop.
So it is quite obvious that many lies have been told and that this is where the key to the story lies. The scenes of the past are only told from Isa’s memories, so the reader only gets fragments, the things she remembers at that moment, and she obviously cannot tell what she does not know, what she has buried deep in her brain and what she refuses to think of. Therefore, you as a reader can only speculate about what the girls have done. When it comes out, I was about disappointed at first because I ranked the deed as not that grave considering their age. Yet, since I was only halfway through the novel, I was sure that more would be coming and I was not disappointed. Until the end, new facts were added to the story and I had to readjust my idea of what had happened several times.

Just like Ruth Ware’s novel “The woman in cabin 10”, I enjoyed reading this one. It is not a suspenseful thriller form the start which gives you the creeps throughout the whole story. It is much more a cleverly built psychological novel which makes you think about what you would do in the characters’ place. You can definitely feel the stress that especially Isa is exposed to, torn between her life in the present and a guilt from the past. There are scary situations, but luckily they do not come from bloody murders described in detail. It is playing on your nerves, the fact of keeping you in the dark about many things clearly supports this.

All in all, I like this kind of thrillers and relished reading it.

Being new to Ruth Ware, I had no idea what to expect. The "blurb" sounded interesting and the cover was well designed, so I requested it.

Boy, am I glad that I did! In common with most mystery/suspense readers, I like to guess the twists and 'whodunit' but I wouldn't advise you try it with this book. Even when my Kindle showed 94% complete, Ms Ware still managed to throw an unexpected turn in.

People say "I couldn't put this book down" and mean they read it in 3 or 4 sessions. This, for me, was a one session, 4 a.m. finish book which left me cursing at my six o'clock alarm!

I will need to read a couple more books before I declare it, but I think Ruth Ware is going to make a space on my "favourite ten authors" list.

Set on an old mill on the coast which is slowly sinking into the sea. The location of this was brilliant as it evoked what was going on in the novel at the same time. Everything fitted in nicely.

Salten is a beautiful and remote spot not far from the old mill so is vulnerable to the rough sea, the outside elements and the harsh winds. It’s as if the rough elements want to come in the house and into Kate’s life - it certainly pounds at the door, keeps her closed in there and makes its presence felt.

The plot however wasn’t up to the standard of the setting and the evocative writing. The friendship as it is, between the women is sometimes uncomfortable and it felt drawn out with stories going in different directions without any sense of direction to the final mystery. The ending wasn’t a surprise so it didn’t stand out for me as her other brilliant novels have done.

Ruth Ware is a brilliant writer and writes evocative locations with ease. I wonder where she’ll take me next?

This was a very, very good story that kept me hooked to the final page. Four very interesting and complex characters. The twists kept on coming and i read this in one go. Had it not been for the very heavy baby aspect i would have given this five stars but i found the constant stream of thought from the main character about the baby too heavy and preachy.