The Perfect Lie

by Jo Spain (Quercus)

Reviewer: Donal O’donoghue Erin, an Irishwoman in New York, is living the life. Newly married to Danny, a police officer with Newport PD, the darkness in her past now seems like a distant memory. Life is for living, until the morning Danny’s fellow police officers visit, prompting Erin’s husband to jump to his death from the balcony of their apartment. Far from home, struggling with her own demons, Erin finds herself rethinking her recent past n this cleverly plotted, and expertly paced, ‘whydunit’ from Jo Spain. As a wise person once said, there are three sides to every story. And The Perfect Lie is fed out in three parts: The Lie, The Truth and The Whole Truth. Black and white is never how the world works and especially the world of the thriller. Jo Spain, with a raft of bestsellers in her back pocket (including the Inspector Tom Reynolds series), knows this and has the skills to execute accordingly with red herrings, likely suspects and a somewhat audacious story within the main story.

This internal tale, set on the Harvard campus some years earlier, with two entirely new characters, is a gamble but Spain keeps us tethered (and curious) as to how it connects with the central narrative, teasing us with breadcrumbs, as the story flips back and forth between now, between what caused a police officer to jump to his death in Long Island in 2019 and a terrible event in Harvard in 2016. Like a close-up magician, all the skill is in the art of distraction, in showing us what we want to see, and Spain pulls it off with style.