Review: ONE LITTLE LIE

ONE LITTLE LIE by Carne Maxwell (2020)

Reviewed by Merilyn Mary

Nineteen-year-old Melissa and her three friends, Katrina, Belinda and Alison, take up an offer of work for the Christmas holidays on Melissa’s uncle’s tomato farm on Waiheke Island. The girls can’t wait to swap their university days for the carefree life, summer provides. However, Melissa hasn’t seen her uncle and her two cousins, Seth and Tyler, for eight years, and when she arrives at their home, her life becomes more complicated than she could ever have imagined.

Katrina, Belinda and Alison find Seth and Tyler promising attractions, and feeling sorry for their friend, push Melissa into the hands of a handsome stranger. When Melissa finds herself compromised, she does the only thing she can think she tells one little lie. Melissa’s deception turns her holiday upside down.

When one of her friends goes missing, and the police start their investigation, Melissa finds that her lie starts to unearth secrets buried for years. Secrets, which send Melissa, her family and her friends down a path of violent clashes of the past, the present and ultimately the future.

“Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!”  So said Sir Walter Scott  And so it was when Melissa decided to tell one little lie.

Set on Waiheke Island, the novel is about four young women with a longstanding friendship taking a working holiday during their university break to earn some money picking tomatoes. The story gradually weaves in relationships and romances until  the heroine makes a poor decision and covers it up with one little lie. This lie grows in magnitude until it involves a pregnancy, her family, her friends, drug taking, drug dealing, and eventually a death which rocks the little community.#

And we are left with the quandary – was it an accident or was it murder?

The story is told through the voices of Melissa, her cousin Seth, Stephen and Clive, a local policeman, all one time friends but circumstances occur to change the dynamics of this friendship. From the first chapter where Melissa is abducted and almost buried alive I was hooked and eagerly read the chapters as the plot evolved to its satisfactory conclusion. The story scans well, is easy to follow and descriptive with such passages as “Lies. You tell one and wham – it’s like a ticking time bomb in your head. It quietly sits there fermenting away and pops up, without warning, over and over and over again. Even if you tell the truth there’s no escape because you’ve already ruined everything”.

I found it difficult to put down and would hide in a corner ignoring what else I could be doing, but deciding that, to read a good book was good for the soul. This was one of those books.

One Little Lie is a novel set in New Zealand with a New Zealand flavour and will be enjoyed by people of all ages as they too think about the consequences of  not telling the truth.

Walter Scott was right. 

This review was first published in FlaxFlower reviews, which focuses on in-depth reviews of New Zealand books of all kinds, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Flaxflower founder and editor Bronwyn Elsmore.