Not a bad beach or travel read but it's not high on my list of thrillers because of the generally unlikable characters, starting with Jan. The timeline shifts back and forth between what happened to lead to her being chained to the wall and her current predicament. There's tension and a page turning sort of plot but it wasn't my favorite. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This felt like a bad copycat of Girl on the Train. Even the cover if you squint your eyes and look at it from afar.

Just read go on Amazon and read the sample...only Chapter One at that, it's like it's trying to copy the style and Rachel's chain of thoughts. It's distractingly close, too. Only, Girl worked because we'd never read anything like it. Now everyone wants to be the next Girl.

This book is supposed to be twisty and unexpected but I guessed exactly what's going on quite early on, then flipped to the last chapter to check and realized that it's most likely not going to have anything else that could dazzle me, so I just skipped through the rest.

I saw some of the people saying here that the characters were hideous or terrible. Well, those are strong words. Sometimes a writer develops a character well, it's just that the character is someone you'd normally dislike in real life. I think that's more the case here.

I started thinking what kind of people I would recommend this book to....still thinking...

Thank you NetGalley for this copy in exchange for my honest review.

I enjoyed this one. It wasn't my fav, but it kept me interested the whole way through. I like how it flowed back and forth in time giving you little hints along the way. It wasn't too much of a mystery to me though, I could tell where it was going. I recognized the meaning of the word, the "mask" and who was responsible pretty early on. I wasn't a super fan of any of the characters. I struggle with feeling compassion for pathological liars and felt the relationships were so fake it was hard to connect with any character. There were a few words that felt forced, but the writing was easy to understand and flowed well. The characters, although I wasn't a super fan, stuck pretty true to their qualities. The end seemed to end too easy, it wasn't much of a mystery. I felt kind of let down the way things worked out, more like a broken puzzle but at least you had all the pieces. Even though it wasn't my favorite, it was a good jump back into fiction after I took a hiatus focusing on school and non-fiction for quite some time.
There is some language and lots of drinking involved.

This is the story of what happens when stupid people go on vacation.

Jan is a liar and miserable. She's also chained to a wall in total darkness. After meeting strangers on a vacation in 5 years in the past, Jan meets up with these same "friends' in Crete. What follows is an overwrought psychological drama with a fairly obvious plot.

The meat of the story is good but it just....wasn't there. It was missing the suspense that makes psychological thrillers so good.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Lies That Bind Us was a quick read for me. I love books with an unreliable narrator and this one was really well-done. I found myself constantly trying to figure out how it would end and could not put it down. I finished the book within a day. It was also very obvious that the book was well-researched, which I really appreciate.

The only criticism I have is that some of the supporting characters choices didn’t always make sense to me. At times, I couldn’t understand why they did certain things. Overall, I would recommend this book.

Book moved too slowly for me. I read rather quickly and after 1.5 hrs I found myself wondering where the plot was going. I skipped to the end just to read the conclusion. I found the main character boring, simply boring. My time is precious and this book just didin't capture my attention long enough to spend the time reading the story.

It’s supposed to be a getaway, a way to remember simple times for Jan. A trip to Crete to reunite with friends she met there five years ago is just what she needs to escape her trouble present. Jan has secrets, but then again, so do her friends. Maybe that’s why she’s now handcuffed to a wall in a pitch black room. She has no memory of how she came to be there, or who would have done this to her. And the bigger question is why? Or does Jan already know? As Jan’s story is peeled back in layers, like an onion, readers will begin to piece together the elaborate puzzle that left Jan chained in that cellar