Not gonna lie, I chose this book solely for the cover alone. It’s gorgeous, but that’s where my like for this book ends.

After the first few chapters things got a little muddled for me. There’s SO much going on that you kind of lose focus on the plot, and on top of that the story switches POV between Lily, Grace, and Flo. It gets confusing keeping up with everything. It sort of corrects itself towards the end of the book, but you’re still left a little frustrated with how the book finishes.

The Cry Of The Lake by Charlie Tyler is a psychological thriller that is also Charlie's first published book. Well, I am glad that she published this one! I fell in love with the cover of this book immediately and hoped what was inside was just as good as the promise the cover held. I am so happy it really did, and more, if that is possible.
Lily is a young girl who chooses not to speak and Grace is her 'mum', none of them are who they say they are. The book opens with a murder and we clearly know who has done it, but the question is why? As the story unfolds, the treachery is unbearable as the aim is to frame an innocent man for murder. The secrets and lies that come to light are like a spiders web, all spun together and make one extremely large and creepy, horrific story.
I really loved Lily, I felt her every pain and sorrow.She is harangued by Grace at every turn and Grace is such an unlikeable woman, selfish, cold and jealous. I wanted to sweep Lily up and bring her home away from the cruelty of Grace. Even knowing Grace's dark, sad past didn't raise too much empathy within me, as I was horrified at the things she took out on Lily. That takes a cold, hard person, as you will discover when you read the book.
A fast paced story beautifully told with heartbeaking detail. A book I really devoured.
Huge thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for allowing me to be a part of this haunting novels Blog Tour today.Also Netgalley for the ebook

This just did not work for me. While I enjoy stories told from multiple viewpoints, it felt like the author was trying to cram too much into the beginning to really solidify any of the characters. I normally give myself until 25% through a book before I decide to dnf it, but I stuck it out until about the 40% mark and I still felt like the plot was muddy and I didn't feel an attachment to the characters.

Interesting premise, but would not recommend unless someone really wants to wade through the muck to potentially find the storyline the blurb promises.

I don’t quote from books, especially not from ARCs but this time I’m going to start with the very first sentence. “Death smells of macaroons.” I so very love macaroons but after reading this sentence I’m not sure I’m gonna look at macaroons the same was I used to.

The Cry of The Lake is one of the most disturbing stories I’ve read this year so far. It’s one of those books you just can’t put down because you need to know what happens next.

And the characters? So well-developed. The main characters Lily and Grace are a mysterie. You know something is very wrong with them - the first chapter sets the mood and you know immediately this book will not end well, it will end in tears and misery - and you want to find out how they ended up where they are. I did, I wanted to know. And when I finally found out there were tears. I felt sad and angry and somehow relieved.

I will be on the lookout for more Charlie Tyler books. He sure knows how to write an emotionally overwhelming story.

Thank you to NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for my copy.

This book is told from Grace, Lily and Flo point of views. It was a pretty dark story but the plot was all over the place. I think for a short story with too much things going on, this story doesn't need multiple pov. It's distracting and I can't focus lol

Thank you Netgalley for The Cry of the Lake ARC!

Firstly I was drawn in by the beautiful cover art on this novel. The red title contrasting sharply with the shades of grey background, and a human skull eerily visible against the flock wallpaper pattern. Even the blurb is fascinating and magical, as a young girl tries to capture a mermaid in the pond at the bottom of the garden. She’s been told stories of Myrtle the mermaid with a crown of flowers singing ‘as I went down to the river to pray’. However, instead of Myrtle she finds a dead body. Confused and terrified she learns to take the memory and lock it away deep inside her mind. Yet, still she sees her in dreams, luring her down to the water with her beautiful singing voice. She sleepwalks and finds herself out in the garden at night, barefoot and cold from the dew on the grass. In order to stop these ‘night terrors’ she is medicated. Although she is a maelstrom of emotions and experiences she will not talk. Ten years down the line Lily’s mother Grace is marrying Tony, who has his own teenage daughter Flo. Flo and Lily strike up a friendship despite Lily’s silence and find ways of communicating through text and scribbles on notepads. When Flo’s father is accused of killing a schoolgirl, the girls join forces to find out what’s really happened but this opens up Lily’s past. Now she must force herself back to that boathouse in order to unearth what really happened and who is responsible.

The author has written a great debut here where she skilfully wrong foots the reader and subverts expectation. That very first line - ‘Death smells of macaroons’ - I was drawn into the story. I knew it was going to be sugary sweet on the surface with a nasty aftertaste - a description that suits our narrator Grace perfectly. From the cover I was expecting an older setting, but this is as modern as it gets. Small details, such as Grace dressing from the Joules catalogue, or the teenagers coming into the cafe for Frappuccino’s set this firmly within the 21st Century. She also places terrible and disturbing events in beautiful, lush countryside full of wild garlic and bluebells. The setting is idyllic, but the events are far from it. I had the sense of something lush and overblown like lilies, where the scent is so strong it’s cloying.

The jump from one narrator to another kept me on my toes too. I did get confused from time to time about who was who, especially when we moved back and forth in time. The characters are fascinating. We meet Lily and her mum Grace as they are coming to an exciting time in their lives. Grace is about to be engaged to Tom and she is the perfect girlfriend, with a plan for a traditional wedding. She and Lily live in a cottage and work in Tom’s cafe, she doesn’t want them to live together until they’re married. She thinks pre-marital sex would be a bad example for their daughters. Also, Lily has health problems. She has selective mutism, and a sleep disorder causing sleepwalking and night terrors that need heavy medication. Tom’s daughter Flo gets along really well with Lily, and has encouraged her to communicate using texts. They get along well in the village, the only fly in the ointment, as far as Grace is concerned, is Tom’s ex Annie the local police woman. It slowly becomes clear that she has deliberately lured Tom away from Annie and feels threatened by their easy intimacy and connection, as well as Annie’s continued friendship with Flo.

Grace is simply trying too hard though. Lily thinks she dresses like she’s colour blind or copies exactly the model in the catalogue. At the village picnic Lily is a amused by how overdressed she is - in the catalogue the outfit would have been set off with a fascinator, but Grace has had to contain herself with a ribbon round her straw hat. Whilst Annie rolls up in denim with a carrier bag of corned beef sandwiches and pickled onion Monster Munch, Grace has smoked salmon on vintage china. Everything is just so. Except Flo doesn’t like fish. We know this drive for perfection is simply a thin veneer covering a much darker heart. Her sugary sweet exterior is as real as her flowing red hair. When schoolgirl Amelie goes missing, Lily knows exactly where she is, because she had to help Grace package her body on the kitchen floor. Grace is as meticulous at cleaning up after the crime as she was at packing a picnic. After disposing of the body, Lily is forced to strip and get in the shower. Then Grace is waiting with hot milk and she’s often so spaced out that she doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t.

We also see that Grace’s adoration of Tom is an act too. In a passage as they snuggle on the sofa, Grace’s real feelings belie her actions:

‘I sat, legs curled up on the sofa, with Tom’s arm draped around my shoulders. The heaviness of his body; the musky scent of his cologne and the graze of his cheek against mine made me feel nauseous. I suppose, if I were forced to be objective, I could see why Annie had been attracted to him and sometimes, when we kissed, the pit of my stomach whirred with a brief flutter of desire. Desire which was quickly followed by a flood of disgust. Tom Marchant was a pathetic liar of a man and every ounce of his being repulsed me.’

This is not just a passing dislike, this is a hatred that runs deep. There is a past here that is complicated and disturbing. The key is in an interesting event that Lily dreams about and has been in therapy for, way back in the past. When she was a little girl, Lily thought that the lake in the grounds hid a mermaid called Myrtle. This started with a fairytale told to her by Grace and Uncle Frank, accompanied by the folk song Down to the River to Pray. Lily hears snatches of it in her dreams. Again, while this sounds like a beautiful story, it comes about around the time that Lily stopped speaking and Grace’s hair turned white overnight. How lucky the girls were to be looked after by Uncle Frank who ran an institute for mental well-being and was involved with pioneering mental health drugs. Lily was seen by a young junior doctor who used a visualisation method to help her with the feelings that disturbed her. He tells her to imagine somewhere she enjoys, and Lily chooses the aquarium with a treasure chest on the sea floor where she can lock away those memories that disturb her. She chooses a key decorated with a spiders web and mimes locking the chest. Then, when she feels safer, they can slowly unlock the chest and taking out one image at a time to work on. Yet this part of the therapy never happened and Lily was left with all these images locked up inside. What will it take to uncover them?

Back at the picnic, the villagers were horrified to find human remains in the lake. Could they belong to Amelie? In the aftermath, Grace agrees that they should all be together, so she and Lily stay over with Tom and Flo. Next morning Flo is horrified to find her beloved fish all dead in the garden pond, the telltale blue of slug pellets lingering on the bottom. Flo calls Annie and she comes out to question everyone. Grace and Tom seem oddly tense, but Flo remembers seeing pond scum on the floor and didn’t Grace put Lily in a shower in the night? As the study the pond Annie sees something else submerged in the rushes. It’s a bundle of shoes, tied together with a pair of knickers and it looks incriminating. There’s no option but to question Tom, remove phones and laptops and start to ask if anyone has noticed Tom getting a little too close to one of his students. Annie isn’t so sure. She confides in Flo that she can’t investigate the case, but she’s suspicious that it all looks a bit too cut and dried. Also, if you were really trying to keep evidence hidden, why would you draw attention to it by committing another crime?

There’s never a moment to to stop and contemplate though. The different perspectives and timelines keep revealing new clues and new horrors. There were times where I had to go back and reread a section to be sure I’d got the right sequence of events, especially where people’s names have changed. That’s mainly because the story is addictive and the pace is relentless. Over 24 hours I was rarely without my head in this book because I was so involved in all the little twists and turns. I wanted to understand how Lily and Grace had become so psychologically disturbed. I had a sense that Lily would start to make more sense once Grace stopped giving her such strong medication. I sensed she was a lot stronger than she thought. I was fascinated in finding out what had formed Grace’s personality and drove her to be so cruel and cunning. I couldn’t stop reading until the tangled web was unravelled. Until Lily’s treasure chest of memories was unlocked and she was able to speak freely again.

This will appear as part of the blog tour this month,

Charlie Tyler created a story on the backbone of what many trauma survivors know: sometimes what you’ve believed to be your truth turns out to be a lie. We are dropped into a kitchen, a young girl named Lily returning home. It seems like any other teenager’s life; the parent asking where the young girl has been, telling her she’s late. But what we find out from the first page is that Lily is not the average teenager and Grace, who is pretending to be her mother, has murdered a young girl.

This thriller is uniquely told from multiple points of view. We know who the killers are, but the real mystery lies in why and how they plan to get away with it. Because it opens this way, it feels dangerous, as if Grace will turn around and realize we’re there, too, witnessing the crime like a fly on the wall.

There were moments I questioned the validity of trauma. Perhaps not the trauma itself, but how it is portrayed through the writing. I don’t claim to be a psychiatrist or therapist of any kind, but I did stop at several points and wonder how someone with extreme trauma could suddenly be thinking clearly after a major triggering episode. There are moments of unnecessary exposition, and times where I felt like the character Grace especially didn’t sound as smart and calculating as I wanted her to be.

While I did have issues with the way phobias are described and felt like the overall plot to frame another character seemed thin, I did think the points of view were creative and I wanted to know more about Lily’s character and what actually happened to her as a child. Tyler did a great job of creating suspense and keeping me engaged in the story.

Never trust a crazy bitch!

Lily and Flo become friends when Lily’s mothers starts dating Flo’s father. Things move fast but before they know it the couple are engaged and it’s getting serious.

Fast forward a couple of days and a girl from Lily and Flo’s school is murdered and Flo’s father is accused of murder. All evidence points to him but Flo knows her father didn’t do it.

After a string of murders both past and present Lily’s world begins to unravel. Her “mother” pumps her with pills and controls her which is why she’s never spoken a word in ten years. Her memoirs are locked in a box with the key being the only trigger.

Everyone has room for an ulterior movie, crazy people always come undone eventually. Only the truth can set you free and finally bring you peace.

Trigger warning for rape, murder, emotional and physical abuse.

A fast paced murder mystery that surrounds a murder that happened a while ago when the protagonist was a child. I highly recommend this read

This was the first book on here that jumped out at me. The cover, title and blurb all intrigued me. The compelling idea that drew me in is that a young girl discovers a dead body as a child and it, rightfully so, traumatises her into her adolescence. The book features multiple flashbacks to reveal the lead-up and aftermath of this discovery following along the thoughts of three characters – Lily, Grace and Flo. While it didn’t take me too long to finish this book, I feel like I was fuelled by a need to get through it rather than desire. It had an unclear and confusing start I found which made it a difficult read and I struggled with this one. The plot had an interesting premise but was bogged down by multiple ideas, subplots, flashbacks and POV’s. I was overwhelmed with information yet underwhelmed with the result.

I was about ¾ in when I finally started to involve myself in the plot and feel for the characters because, at this point, I figured out what was going on. While I understand the need for suspense, I felt I was confused for too long for it to be a compelling read. The characters were interesting but, for me, there wasn’t enough character development to balance out the chaotic (and often confusing) lines of the plot and I prefer to be more invested earlier on. I put this down to the pacing and the flashback jumps that pulled me out of the story and often made it confusing.

All in all, I enjoyed some parts of this read but I was underwhelmed on the whole. There was too much needlessly going on in the plot and too little in the characters. Whilst this will appeal to some it didn’t for me and wasn’t what I wanted to read.

I admit that it was cover love at first sight when I first saw The Cry Of The Lake, but I was intrigued by the blurb as well and I just couldn't resist giving it a go. I was looking forward to this story, but somehow sadly I wasn't all too impressed by what I found. I'm having a hard time pinpointing exactly what went wrong for me, but I'll try to explain which elements didn't work for me below.

The first thing that stands out is the structure of the plot. The Cry Of The Lake has a multiple POV structure and is divided into three different POVs following the three most present female characters: Grace, Lily and Flo. This kind of structure can really spice up a story, but sadly I didn't think they actually complemented each other and ended up being distracting instead. The POV switches only further interrupted an already quite erratic pace and made it considerably harder to stay focused on the story itself... The fact that the characters themselves didn't feel realistic and were hard to like didn't really help either. I'm not sure if it was lack of development or simply the way they were represented and acted, but none of them actually convinced me and this always turns the story in that much more of a struggle.

As for the plot itself... I felt it was just too chaotic and over the top; both the plot development and plot twists seemed unrealistic and weren't able to convince me. And as much as I love a puzzle and lots of question marks in my thrillers, I think in the case of The Cry Of The Lake there were just too many riddles and the lack of information was actually confusing and rather frustrating instead of it adding the intended dose of suspense. This might just have been a personal reaction, but it is what it is I guess... On top of this, I wasn't able to warm up to the writing either; up to the point that I was starting to feel the urge to skimread... And this is of course never a good sign. All in all it wasn't the reading experience I was hoping for, although I do seem to be in the minority so this might just not have been the right story for me at the moment.

Thank you NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for the eARC.
What an amazing book, absolutely riveting!
It's told from the perspective of three characters: Lily, the mute young girl; Grace, her psychopathic sister/mother and Flo, Lily's best and only friend.
This is probably going to be my favorite book of 2020, it's a psychological thriller, but it's so different from most others, it's actually genius in it's concept. Plus, there's no gratuitous violence, it's subtle with a creeping horror that's thrilling enough to make you keep reading, but at the same time you don't want the book to end...
Wow, what a great read, can't wait for Charlie Tyler 's next book, highly recommended!

I've got to be honest I really didn't "get" this book. It was difficult to know which path it was taking and veered off on too many tangents for me rather than staying focused on the story at hand.

"A gruesome discovery unravels a dark trail of murder and madness.

A six-year-old girl sneaks out of bed to capture a mermaid but instead discovers a dead body. Terrified and unable to make sense of what she sees, she locks the vision deep inside her mind.

Ten years later, Lily is introduced to the charismatic Flo and they become best friends. But Lily is guilt-ridden - she is hiding a terrible secret which has the power to destroy both their lives.

When Flo’s father is accused of killing a schoolgirl, the horrors of Lily’s past come bubbling to the surface. Lily knows that, whatever the consequences, she has to make things right. She must go back to the events of her childhood and face what happened at the boat house all those years ago.

Can Lily and Flo discover what is hiding in the murky waters of the lake before the killer strikes again?"

Past horrors bubbling to the surface? I'm liking this lake!

This book took me a little bit to get into, but once I understood what was going on, I couldn't put it down! I literally finished it in one weekend. So much suspense and twists in the plot. I'm not sure how the author was able to tie everything together, but it was done masterfully. I will be looking for more of this authors books!

Lily A six-year-old girl sneaks out of bed to capture a mermaid but instead discovers a dead body.
Ten years later she meets Flo.
Lily is hiding a terrible secret which has the power to destroy both their lives.
When Flo’s father is accused of killing a schoolgirl, the horrors of Lily’s past come bubbling to the surface.
Lily knows she has to make things right. And face what happened to her all all those years ago.

This book was a bit s!ow at first. But boy as I kept reading did the story pick up.
This book had that thriller/mystery feel. That I absolutely love. The plot and ending had me saying "what" "wow"!!!
I sure hope to read more from Charlie Tyler his writing is wonderful.

Thank You NeyGalley And Publisher for this great ARC

One of my favourites reads this year. a great psychological thriller about two sisters traumatized by the past. This book is well written, very witty and quite fast-paced. I was hooked from the start and was sad it finished which is always a good sign! Look forward to reading more books by this author.

A very good debut psychological thriller by a UK author. It’s quite dark without being graphic.
The chapters are told by 3 characters point of view, Lily, Grace and Flo. The time span of the book goes between present day and the past.
The novel has a multitude of layers which are gradually exposed As the layers emerge the body count increases. There would be a statement left and you have to wait (impatiently) for it’s explanation to be revealed which adds to the tension.
Because of the deception which is revealed as the book progresses I did find the first chapter a bit confusing.
It certainly got my attention from the beginning and held it throughout.
Is there a snippet of the supernatural?or is it a medication withdrawal hallucination at the end of the book?
Thanks to netgalley for letting me read this book.
#netgalley. #thecryofthelake

A gorgeous cover to draw you in,and terrific opening pages that get you hooked.
A clearly completely nuts character,who is driven to wreak havoc on someone that did them wrong in the past.
Definitely a page turner.
By the time I was half way through though,it was getting too over the top for me ,too many secrets and lies and all a bit preposterous.
Still a good solid rad,but the first half was my favourite.