Bestselling crime author Lucy Harper based her intelligent, fearless detective Eliza Grey on her childhood imaginary friend. While her success has allowed her and her husband, Dan, to achieve a lifestyle neither of them imagined, unspoken between them is the fact that Dan’s literary career stalled and instead of writing himself, he became Lucy’s manager. Lucy has been pleased with the arrangement: she’s never enjoyed the minutia of contracts or budgets.

But things are coming to a head: Lucy’s taken a risk with her newest manuscript, one that may threaten the steady stream of royalty payments. At the same time, Dan buys a dilapidated mansion near the street where Lucy grew up—and where her little brother went missing and was never found. Although it seemed inconceivable a young girl could harm her three-year-old brother, Lucy’s inconsistent and fantastical statements rankled the detectives and tormented her parents.

When Dan disappears and his beloved car is found nearby, the interior scorched, the police, the community, and even her fans turn on Lucy. To clear herself of suspicion, she knows she’ll have to find out what really happened to her brother so long ago…and maybe confront difficult truths she’s hidden from herself.

I enjoy thrillers with paranoid, unreliable narrators, and Lucy Harper fits that mold completely. Dan, her husband, had been such a manipulative force in Lucy’s life, I had no empathy for him: I wonder how the book would have been different if he’d been a more sympathetic character, not that it detracted from the story.

In addition to the mystery of what happened to her brother and Dan, running throughout the book was a subplot about the publishing process which was very interesting and didn’t always present publishers in the most positive light—it made me curious if Macmillan drew from experience or created it for the narrative.

When reading the book, I was completely engrossed and was very invested in the mystery and characters, but the resolution didn’t completely work for me: it seemed a different book barged in and took over without any warning.

Overall, I thought this was an engaging and intriguing thriller, and especially if you are like me and have a fondness for unreliable narrators, you should give it a try.

To Tell You the Truth is a fantastic thriller! I loved reading about Lucy, and trying to figure everything out was a puzzle, but a great one, the kind where you think "But....?" more than once. As usual, Gilly Macmillan has written a spectacular thriller that asks a lot of great questions about who we are and who we really are. Very highly recommended!

This is a book about a writer, a missing child, and the life of an author. Lots of unpredictable twists and turns. I would highly recommend

With much anticipation, I began To Tell You The Truth by Gilly Macmillan. For me, the book started off rather slowly. I struggled to get into it. Thinking it may just be bad timing on my part, I put it aside and picked it back up later. It was just ok, never really grabbing my attention. I couldn't connect with the characters and my mind kept wandering. I was hoping for some really grand ending that would make the read worthwhile but that just didn't happen.

This book was confusing and I loved it! It was a true psychological thriller to mimic that of Gillian Flynn. I really enjoyed going through the entire journey with Lucy and Eliza. It was so clever! If you crave being stumped the entire time, read this book! It will not disappoint!

Lucy Harper is a successful author has just finished her latest book about DS Eliza Grey, the main character in Lucy’s novels and also her lifelong imaginary friend. After finishing her latest novel, Dan, Lucy’s husband, has vanished. But this isn’t the first time that someone has disappeared from Lucy’s life. Three decades ago, her little brother Teddy also went missing and was never found. Lucy, the only witness, helplessly spun fantasy after fantasy about Teddy’s disappearance, to the detectives’ fury and her parents’ despair.

This exciting story is told from Lucy’s point of view, both as a child and as an adult. The fact that Lucy sees and speaks to her imaginary friend makes her an very interesting narrator. Was Dan gaslighting her? Does she have multiple personality disorder? Did she hurt Teddy?

This was my first Gilly Macmillan book, and it will not be my last. The suspenseful, fast paced story was full of interesting characters kept me guessing until the very end.

Thank you Gilly Macmillan, Netgalley and William Morrow / Harper Collins for this enjoyable ARC.

My first book read by the author and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I love her writing style. The many twists and turns kept my engaged. I loved the way she folded the history into the present time without creating confusion. I would definitely recommend this book!

This book will mess with your mind! Lucy suffered from the traumatic loss of her brother when she was nine. She's always had an active imagination and an imaginary friend that followed her along into adulthood. She's now a famous crime story author and her husband goes missing. Add that all together and you can't figure out what is going to happen!

I believe this is the first book I have read by Gilly Macmillan, so I didn't really know what to expect. Though I liked the dual storyline, I did not find any of the characters to be likable or relatable. It was also disappointing that one of the mysteries was left unfinished. I appreciate the opportunity to read an advance copy via Book Club Girl and Netgalley and intend to check out the author's previous work.

This was a great book to read. The way the story went between Lucy’s present and past builds a great storyline where each event becomes another layer to the story and you find yourself turning pages to find what the next layer will contain. The voice of Eliza gives us great insight and seems to be the filling for each of those layers. I enjoy reading books where the story gradually builds and this book did not disappoint.

Famous suspense novelist Lucy Harper steadily propels herself up the bestseller charts with each book that she writes. Her husband Dan, now her assistant, is supportive of her, even though his own writing career has stalled. But now Dan is missing. He’s not the only one missing in her life though. Many years ago, Lucy’s little brother disappeared, never to be found. Lucy now has to solve her own real-life mystery, which takes her to places she never expected.

To Tell You the Truth by Gilly Macmillan is fast-paced and will keep you guessing until the very end!

If you are someone who spends your days living in your imagination, how do you know where your imagination ends and reality begins? Author Lucy Harper spends her days in a world of her own creation, where detective Eliza Grey solves crimes.

Since the first Eliza Grey novel several years ago, her fandom just keeps growing. So now, Lucy feels like she is on a treadmill, having to write a book a year for her fans and her publisher. Her husband, Dan, also a writer, has become a part of the Eliza Grey universe as well, working as Lucy’s manager and personal assistant, to keep the bills paid, the refrigerator full, and making sure his wife has everything she needs to keep writing.

Lucy, however, is exhausted. The book-every-year schedule has turned into a grind, leaving her bone-weary. Her writing schedule doesn’t leave her much time building friendships, so she feels isolated, Dan and Eliza being her only friends. So when Dan starts making decisions that Lucy questions or says something she thinks is unkind, she’s uncertain if she can trust her own thoughts. Maybe she’s just being overly sensitive, she wonders. I should be grateful for his help, she thinks.

But then he buys a house without talking to her. A house that’s close to where she grew up. Too close. And she’s flooded with emotions from when she was nine and her younger brother Teddy was three, and they went into the woods together late at night. She made it home shortly before dawn. Teddy never did. Lucy doesn’t remember everything that happened that night, but her best friend, her imaginary friend Eliza, may know more than she’s saying.

And then blood spots appear in the entryway to the house. Large spots, which Lucy scrubs away without telling anyone. Then Dan goes missing. His car, his beloved Jaguar bought with Lucy’s royalties, shows up abandoned and burned. And then all eyes turn toward Lucy. Could she be a killer, in those moments she spends between imagination and reality? Is it possible she’s killed again?

Gilly Macmillan’s explosive new thriller To Tell You the Truth is a compelling thriller that exposes our vulnerabilities as humans. Lack of sleep, lack of human interaction, poor nutrition, too much time spent working—all of these can make anyone feel a little crazy. They can make you feel like you’re not sure what’s real. They can make you question yourself, your family, your friends. And Macmillan uses that to perfection.

I got sucked in to To Tell You the Truth from almost the first page. Maybe this says a little too much about me and some of the jobs I’ve had, but I immediately felt for Lucy, understanding that felling of too much work and not enough self-care. And I just wanted to know more about her, to see where her story was going, to make sure she was okay in the end. I raced through this book, loving every page. Every. Page.

I highly recommend this one to anyone who loves a good thriller and needs something engrossing to get lost it for a while!

Egalleys for To Tell You the Truth were provided by William Morrow through NetGalley, with many thanks.

To Tell You the Truth is a page-turning thriller that I devoured in two days! I didn’t want to put the book down to eat or run my errands because I just had to know what was going to happen next. Also, I am pretty sure I’ve found my next auto-buy author. If this is standard Gilly Macmillan writing, then I’ve been missing out big time!

I really enjoyed the format and structure of this book, which flowed flawlessly. The chapters toggle between what is clearly a draft of a book, flashbacks to when Lucy’s brother Teddy disappeared, and the present-day search for her missing husband. I loved thinking one way and being completely wrong when the truth was finally revealed. This type of structure can oftentimes seem choppy, but Macmillan does a superb job at weaving the pieces together to tell a coherent story.

The character of Lucy was quite interesting and at times exhausting. Her decisions were never in her best interest and that drove me crazy. However, it fit perfectly with her character and made her an unreliable narrator. We witness everything play out through Lucy’s eyes – Teddy’s disappearance, her marriage, and the investigation into Dan’s disappearance. I found myself questioning Lucy’s interpretation of events and whether she was telling the truth or the latest version she concocted in her mind. Her paranoia had me on edge throughout the entire book because I was afraid of what she was going to do next and wondered if someone was out to get her.

Eliza is another character that was lurked in the pages of the book and Lucy’s mind. She was Lucy’s imaginary friend as a child and the heroine of Lucy’s bestselling detective series. Most people grow out of their imaginary friends, but Eliza remained with Lucy throughout her adult life. I loved how she would just pop up in the middle of a chapter and rescue Lucy from herself. However, I started wondering if Eliza was an imaginary friend or if Lucy had some sort of personality disorder. The character of Eliza provided another layer to Lucy as an alter ego and a sign of her instability.

I seriously could not stand Dan’s character and the way he leeched off Lucy’s success and disguised his jealousy as devotion and protection. When he turns up missing I thought “good riddance,” but still wanted to know what happened to him. I found myself going back and forth as to whether he disappeared on his own or if something more sinister happened.

Macmillan’s writing brought the characters to life and had a vice like grip on my attention. I couldn’t stop reading and had to physically force myself to put the book away and go to bed. I was captivated by the twists and turns in the story and completely invested in the outcome. The one thing that I disliked would have to be the way the book ended. There were some unanswered questions that I hoped would have been resolved, but this did not impact my overall rating of the book. I highly recommend To Tell You the Truth to anyone that loves fast-paced thrillers that shock you with each revelation.

Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

To Tell You the Truth by Gilly MacMillan is a pretty well-written thriller/mystery which is the story of author Lucy Harper in the current day and Lucy Bewley as she had been a child. Her three-year-old brother Teddy had disappeared one night and it was partly her fault. At points in the investigation they thought she had hurt or killed him. She was totally traumatized by this, so much so that her childhood imaginary friend, Edith, had become a part of her subconscious and sometimes her conscious self. Was Edith an alternate personality? Sometimes Lucy allowed her to take over, she knew that. Lucy had used Edith by making her the heroine of her extremely successful detective series, but had written her most recent book wherein Edith became incapacitated and was not in most of the book. No one knew that . . . yet. Her husband, Dan, had celebrated by buying a house. He was in charge of the money. He had taken her back to the woods where Teddy and disappeared and she knew she could never live there. He didn't understand. Then one night, the police appeared to tell her that they had found his care, burned out, and him missing. Was it happening all over again?

This was an interesting book. For much of it the reader felt as if he was experiencing Lucy's mental breakdown from the inside. The mystery was a good one, with many parts, and made worse by the slim hold Lucy had on herself. The people in the neighborhood were less well-rounded, but good enough to fill their roles. We learned about them as the story unfolded, along with more that one red herring. It was a classic tale of someone being used under the guise of being loved. In that, it was very sad. Not a warm and cozy book by any means, but one well worth the read. I recommend it.

I was invited to read a free ARC of To Tell You The Truth by Netgalley. All opinions and interpretations contained herein are solely my own. #netgalley #totellyouthetruth

Lucy Harper is a best-selling mystery writer. When she was nine years old her younger brother disappeared. Now her husband has disappeared. Lucy is scared and confused and doesn’t know who to trust or what is happening, but she feels as if she and her whole world is falling apart. The author does a good job of building up fear in Lucy and suspense.

To Tell You The Truth is a psychological thriller crossing time frames, relationships, friendships, business relationships, marriage, family, siblings - all the things in life that get messy and therefore interesting. The author has done an excellent job weaving all the threads of her story into an intriguing plot that kept me riveted to every page. And she definitely did not reveal the conclusions of her many characters stories until the very end. Definitely recommend! #ToTellYouTheTruth #GillyMacmillan #WilliamMorrow #SceneOfTheCrime #NetGalley

Lucy Harper is now a famous author of DS Eliza Grey police procedurals. As she just finished her new novel that wasn't about the detective, her husband, Dan, unbeknownst to her, bought a house to renovate. And it happened to be in the same area where she use to live when her brother, Teddy disappeared, so many years ago. Since Dan had always handled all her finances, this sudden move made her think about his motives. And when Dan goes missing, a number of incidents begin to point toward her as the culprit.
A tight, tense thriller, with the narrative moving between the present and the past, when her brother went missing.
Thank you Harper Collins and NetGallery for this e-copy of "To Tell You The Truth".

Wow what is going here?! This is so good and twisty, definitely keeps you guessing. MC Lucy Harper is a bestselling mystery author. Her life is viewed and questioned soon after her husband, Dan, goes missing. Personally I said good riddance because Dan is controlling and jealous of Lucy’s accolades as a writer. Lucy’s brother also went missing and never to be found when they were young, is this a coincidence? Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for an ebook ARC. This is my honest review.

2.5 stars

In comparisons to August (during which time I surprised myself by reading a record 7 books in a month!), September is shaping up to be a slower reading month for me. The past 2 weeks were unexpectedly busy and I had a few things going on that occupied my time. I’m back into my regular reading schedule now though and have a few books lined up already so hopefully nothing else comes up between now and end of the month so I can use this last week and a half to “make up for lost time” where my reading is concerned.

During this time period, the one book I was able to finish was Gilly Macmillan’s latest psychological thriller To Tell You the Truth (scheduled for release 9/22). Initially, I was excited going into this one, as the previous work of this author’s that I’d read (I Know You Know from 2018), I had really enjoyed, so I was thinking this would be in the same vein. It turns out I was completely wrong, and not in a good way either. With this newest work, I actually came out of it confused, disappointed, and super annoyed — obviously a way different reaction from previous. The main reason for my annoyance were the characters, all of whom were despicable and hugely unlikable, which, for me, isn’t usually a problem as long as the rest of the story is done well — unfortunately, I can’t say that was the case here. I’ll get into the issues I had with the story and plot later. First though, the characters...

One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to psychological thrillers / suspense novels with an adult female protagonist at the center of the story is for her to be written in such a way that she comes across as wishy-washy, overly emotional, incapable of thinking rationally, lacking any sense of self-preservation and common sense, etc. This is usually portrayed through the protagonist deciding to still go forward with things that she has already determined (through an inner dialogue with herself via first person narrative) are bad or will result in negative consequences — basically, the dialogue goes along the lines of “I knew I shouldn’t, but I went along with it anyway” or “I should tell him no but the word yes comes out of my mouth instead”. The frustrating part is that the protagonist nonsensically makes these kinds of bad decisions repeatedly throughout the story and therefore keeps getting herself in predicaments that are entirely preventable. Even if the protagonist is only like this for part of the story and they seem to “wisen up” somewhat later on, it still taints the entire story for me.

Unfortunately for me, the main protagonist of To Tell You the Truth, Lucy Harper, is exactly this type of character. In a way, it made me mad the way she was portrayed, since technically, the characterization could’ve gone several ways. Lucy is a best-selling author who is supposedly smart and talented as heck and who has enjoyed a decades-long career writing multiple books that sold millions, but when she’s not writing, she’s basically walking around in a fog most of the time, willfully oblivious to anything that happens where her husband Daniel is concerned. For example, Daniel uses Lucy’s money to buy a million dollar mansion, puts only his own name on the deed, swiftly gives notice on the place where they are currently living so that they are forced to move within only a few days, etc. (yes, there is more, I just didn’t list it all). Here’s the catch though: he does all this behind Lucy’s back without discussing it with her. What’s worse is that the mansion is located just down the street from where Lucy lived as a child — a place that Lucy never wanted to go back to because of what had happened to her brother Teddy 30 years ago (Daniel has full knowledge of this and also knows full well the impact that Teddy’s disappearance had on her). When Daniel casually springs the sale of the house and the move, etc. on Lucy as though it’s something perfectly normal that a doting husband does for his wife and she would be a fool not to go along with it, Lucy is supposedly angry (at least that’s what she tells herself), but instead of making her disdain and objections known or confronting him about it or calling out his obvious selfishness, she just stands idly by and let’s him do what he wants. Even though she is seething inside and pissed off and can already see the train wreck waiting to happen financially (we know all this because the narrative is in first person), her actions speak otherwise, as she chooses the “naive, docile wife” route and basically ignores all the red flags starring her in the face. It’s also maddening that at various points in the story, it is inferred that Lucy’s behavior is a result of her being psychotic or paranoid or whatnot and that she is not “right in the head.” To me, the entire characterization felt too stereotypical and convenient (not to mention downright annoying and frustrating). I think it’s interesting that this is the third psychological thriller / suspense novel I’ve read so far this year with this type of protagonist — either this is starting to become a trend now with this genre for some reason or I’m having incredibly bad luck with choosing the wrong thrillers to read.

To make matters worse, Lucy actually wasn’t the only annoying character. I already mentioned earlier that nearly all the characters were unlikable — Daniel was obviously a douchebag, all of Lucy’s neighbors were hateful people, and most of the other characters were either incompetent or insignificant in terms of the story. All of them were honestly really frustrating to read about — which brings me to the issues I had with the execution of the story. I don’t want to go too much into the plot, as I don’t want to give the story away, but there were quite a few plot holes involving some of the characters that honestly didn’t make much sense and in the end, were left unresolved. It was to the point where it made me wonder why those scenes with those characters were included in the first place. The other thing I didn’t like was that the last third of the story felt like a rushed exercise in “plot dumping” — essentially the plot details were dumped on the reader in swift succession, one right after the other, but some of it didn’t make sense based on the progression of the story up to that point. I also felt like some of the threads were left hanging in that some significant detail would get cryptically brought up in a scene that points to the thread going in a certain direction, but then the story ends without any reference back to it. When I read mystery / thriller / suspense novels, I of course don’t expect a straightforward, easy-to-figure-out ending delivered nicely in a box with a pretty bow on top (in fact, the opposite is true in that there should be some twists and turns and the plot should be unpredictable). With that said though, one thing I do expect is closure, especially with the main story arc, which I didn’t feel that I got in this instance (I don’t want to say more — those who read the book will probably understand what I’m referring to).

With all that said, this one wasn’t all bad. Parts of it truly were intriguing, plus I actually didn’t guess the ending or what happened to Daniel, so I guess from a thriller perspective, it did its job. The premise also had a lot of potential — I think Gilly Macmillan had the right idea, it’s just she tried to cover too much ground and the story ended up getting away from her. From her past works, I know she is capable of writing a cleverly crafted, compelling thriller with interesting and complicated characters — unfortunately, this one isn’t it. Despite the not-so-good experience with this one, I’m still interested in reading other works by this author, especially since I did have a good experience with her previous work. Hopefully her next one will work out better for me.

Received ARC from William Morrow (HarperCollins) via NetGalley.

To Tell the Truth is a great read, I couldn't put it down. I can't wait to read more from Gill Macmillan.