Reviewed by Jeannie McLean
Their college days are long-gone, but their reunion will be murder…
When Lexie Wyatt’s close friend Helen is frightened by an unexpected visit from an ex-university flatmate, Lexie is determined to help. She contrives an invitation to a weekend reunion of the group at one of England’s ancient stone circles. While there one of them admits they believe their long-dead friend was murdered. Digging into the flatmates’ secrets, Lexie discovers they have lied. Could they also have committed murder?
There is another murder at the stone circles, and Lexie uncovers information that may connect the two crimes… and implicate her good friend. Is someone targeting the former students, or is the killer one of the group? After another murder, Lexie is in a race against time to discover the killer before there are yet more deaths.
Is one lie worse than another? Is a lie by omission, still a lie? If a lie only affects one other person, is it less of a lie than one that impacts on the lives of a number of people? If another person reacts badly to the first lie, whose fault is that?
The Worst Lie, New Zealand author, Shauna Bickley’s sequel to Still Death, opens with a sacrificial body placed on a fallen slab within a stone circle. It soon becomes apparent this is not the first death.
And so the reader is drawn in. We meet lead character, Lexie Wyatt, a year on from our first acquaintance with her and we keenly follow her quest to uncover the truth not only of that death but how it links to events of more than a decade previously.
Lexie’s friend Helen’s is overly anxious at the unexpected arrival of a former friend. Helen admits to Lexie that, in a fluster, she offered accommodation, which she now regrets, to well-known investigative journalist Eden Sandiford and Hunter Munroe, Eden’s partner in public and private life. Lexie offers her support to Helen, but at the same time she is curious to know why Helen is so unhappy at meeting up with a mate from university days. Lexie’s curiousity only increases when Helen cryptically asks Lexie if she believes that the past comes back to haunt you. For all the right reasons of friendship and kindness, Lexie finds her busy, happy, ordered life in the fictional Dorset town of Nettleford, is once again disrupted.
In order to help Helen understand Eden’s motives for turning up, Lexie, herself a writer for a newspaper supplement, concocts a plan to write an article about women in dangerous jobs and she persuades Eden to be interviewed. During the interview, Eden confides to Lexie that she believes her best friend from university days, Madelaine, did not commit suicide, but was murdered. Although the police returned an open verdict, believing that Madelaine was responsible for a fatal hit-and-run accident and committed suicide in remorse, Eden is convinced the murderer is one of the university group. She intends to reunite the former friends in an effort to get to the truth.
Hesitating only for a moment, Lexie accepts Eden’s invitation to join their weekend away, purportedly to finish off the interview but at Eden’s insistence, to be the objective eyes watching them all. From Lexie’s point of view it also gives her the opportunity to absolve Helen and Helen’s husband Gareth of any involvement.
Eden arranges for everyone to meet at Little Stillford where the group last were all together. It’s known for its historic, ancient stone circles, and for the group, it has an eerie link to the death of Madelaine. The weekend is not quite the relaxed, children-free weekend that Lexie’s husband Nathan was promised. Tensions flourish, old animosities resurface and Lexie sets out to piece together events of the last time the group were at the stone circles and why Eden is convinced Madelaine was murdered.
Gareth had been Madelaine’s boyfriend, and is now married to Helen, Renelle had not been particularly well-liked and few seemed overly concerrned when she was effectively removed from university, suspected of having an affair with a lecturer. Now, Renelle is married to Mitch, who was then, and still remains, very close to Eden. Spike, a close friend and influencer of up-and-coming actress Madelaine is now a successful film director. Laurence works in IT and brings his latest girlfriend. Helen, a late comer to the group, joining on the departure of Renelle, has since married Gareth,
Just as Lexie thinks she’s getting to know each member of the group and get her head around the undercurrents swirling between them, Helen’s worry that the past returns becomes prophetic. Renelle is found dead, posed on the fallen circle slab, reminiscent of the well known poster advertising Madelaine’s last film, The Legacy of Time (a clever nod to the key theme. As Hunter says at one point ‘Some people need help and others need to pay for what they have done.’).
After the memorial service, Eden reconvenes the group to support Mitch and Lexie realises she is not the only one who thinks the recent murder of Renelle is linked to Madelaine’s death. In pursuing the truth, Lexie gives little thought to the danger she puts herself in.
The Worst Lie is a pyschological study of relationships built on lies. Madelaine’s death creates the first crack and the group effectively disbands, although individuals stay in touch. Eden has her reasons for wanting to get to the truth of Madelaine’s death, but by drawing the group together again, she reinforces their need to stick to the lies they’ve told. Events are set in motion that lead to further tragedy but also, eventually, to the truth and resolution of past wrongs.
There is a cast of characters. The reader needs to keep track of who was friendly /sleeping with/ignoring/downright rude to whom originally and their subsequent interelationships. Bickley has an innate understanding of human emotions and motivations, positive and negative and she gives us a study of human behaviour when personal interest is put before the needs of others. Pay attention to Lexie’s conversations with the various characters. The clues are there. Lexie is a true friend to Helen, ready to help and support her but, convinced as she is that neither Helen nor Gareth could be in any way directly involved in murder, her inquisitive brain insists on knowing the truth. We learn of Helen’s and Gareth’s back story and come to understand their natural reticience. Eden is adventurous and intelligent, egotistical and selfish and not averse to manipulating others to her own end, yet she is fiercely loyal to the memory of her close friend, Madelaine. Renelle is a misunderstood scapegoat and to an extent, a victim of her own insecurities. Unlike in the first book, Still Death, in this outing, Lexie’s husband, Nathan is mainly a support and sounding board for Lexie as she works through her theories of what really happened all those years ago.
While most of the story takes place in 2018 and is seen through Lexie Wyatt’s eyes, Bickley makes use of limited dual-time, and multiple narrative, with just enough detail given from the point of view of Eden, Helen, and Renelle to fill in gaps that Lexie or anyone else is unlikely to know. She also uses common crime story tropes; letters, photographs, eavesdropping, but given that the earlier events are before smartphones and the wide-spread use of the internet to document every aspect of one’s life, these literary devices fit smoothly into the overall arc of the story.
Bickley explores a number of themes; responsibility, friendship, forgiveness, love and loyalty, and as often happens when any one of these is out-of-kilter, the flip-side, revenge. She gives us a story of ordinary people whose past actions resurface and must be faced. Sometimes humans behave well in such circumstances, and sometimes, they do not.
The Worst Lie, is a stand alone story but it delivers more of Lexie, her husband Nathan and their chidlren and the goings on in not-so quiet-under-the-surface Nettleford. The novel fits into the cosy crime genre; it’s set in a small urban setting, sex and violence do not dominate, an amateur is at it’s centre. It’s a very good who done it, with twists and layers that will have you guessing to the very end.
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