The last time I lied A novel

Riley Sager

Book - 2018

"In the new novel from the bestselling author of Final Girls, The Last Time I Lied follows a young woman as she returns to her childhood summer camp to uncover the truth about a tragedy that happened there fifteen years ago. Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their tiny cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. The games ended when Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin in the dead of night. The last she--or anyone--saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips. Now a rising star in the New York art scene, Emma turns her past into paintings--massive canvases filled wi...th dark leaves and gnarled branches that cover ghostly shapes in white dresses. The paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the socialite and wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale. When Francesca implores her to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor, Emma sees an opportunity to try to find out what really happened to her friends. Yet it's immediately clear that all is not right at Camp Nightingale. Already haunted by memories from fifteen years ago, Emma discovers a security camera pointed directly at her cabin, mounting mistrust from Francesca and, most disturbing of all, cryptic clues Vivian left behind about the camp's twisted origins. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing threats from both man and nature in the present. And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale, the more she realizes it may come at a deadly price"--

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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Thrillers (Fiction)
Published
New York, New York : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Riley Sager (author)
Physical Description
370 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781524743079
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

LAST YEAR'S "FINAL GIRLS," the first novel by the pseudonymous author Riley Sager, was praised by the thriller masters Stephen King and Karin Slaughter, earning comparisons to Gillian Flynn, the gold standard for smart psychological suspense. Sager's follow-up, "The Last Time I Lied," has what it takes to deliver the same chills: a creepy premise, a narrator with a haunted past and a series of delicious hints that portend a final, jaw-dropping bombshell that connects long-buried secrets to the present. The premise: Fifteen years ago, three teenage girls - Vivian, Natalie and Allison - sneaked out of their cabin at Camp Nightingale and were never seen again. Now the wealthy, well-connected camp owner is reopening Nightingale with a staff populated by the prior generation of campers, providing plenty of potential witnesses and suspects. The narrator, Emma Davis, the sole cabinmate of the three vanished girls, returns to Nightingale, supposedly to teach art but also to find closure. Her obsession with images of her lost friends, references she makes to withheld information and her own psychological instability, even the book title itself, all point to one message: Emma's not reliable. As for the final bombshell, more on that later. Emma notes upon her return to Camp Nightingale that "it feels like no time has passed between then and now. That the last decade and a half of my life was nothing but a dream." Unfortunately, she's not alone in that feeling. Emma is meant to be a 28-year-old rising star in the Manhattan art world, but we know little about her other than the traumatic event that occurred when she was 13. When she meets the three girls half her age she's (implausibly) bunked-up with, her voice is "meek, almost apologetic," because we are told that she has spent the interim years with "shy, nerdy" boys who "can break your heart and betray you, but not in the same stinging way girls can." While Sager attempts to explore the intense dynamics within adolescent female friendships, an overly large cast of thinly sketched characters undermines the effort, and genre fans searching for more than the requisite ingredients of a solid thriller may find themselves unsatisfied. The book's most vibrant exchanges take place in the past, between younger Emma and Vivian, the Queen Bee of Nightingale, who seduced Emma as only a wiser, more sophisticated girl could. Was Vivian genuinely looking out for Emma, or searching for a mouse to bat around for a summer? Or both? Does it matter, so long as Emma was hooked? Compared to the piercing Vivian-Emma relationship, however, the rest of the female campers feel extraneous. Indeed, sometimes the only way to keep track of the many characters is by relying on the stereotypes employed to introduce them in rapid succession. Allison would have turned out to be "cute and petite like her mother," while "Natalie would have remained physically formidable, thanks to sports in college." Among the new generation, Krystal is the comic-loving, teddybear-hugging nerd who is "several pounds heavier" than smart, friendly, bespectacled Sasha. Both of them defer to Miranda - the "alpha female," "hottest in the room," and "thoroughly unimpressed with everything," except perhaps her "taut stomach" and pierced nose. The dialogue - overly earnest with the exception of some notquite-timely slang and plenty of mean-girl fat-shaming - doesn't lend a hand to the characterization. But like "The Last Time 1 Lied," this review saves the best for last. With each partial reveal - even when we're led to believe that we know everything Emma knows - Sager hints that there's more to come. And in the end, the author delivers the kind of unpredictable conclusion that all thriller readers crave - utterly shocking yet craftily foreshadowed. For some readers, though, these might be the only pages that linger. ? ALAFAIR burke is the author, most recently, of "The Wife."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 2, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The summer that Emma Davis spent at Camp Nightingale began like a dream come true but ended in tragedy when her cabin-mates, Vivian, Natalie, and Allison, disappeared. Distraught, Emma accused Nightingale's owner's son of harming the girls, and the camp closed under a cloud of suspicion. Now an up-and-coming artist in New York, Emma is haunted by both the disappearances and guilt over her accusation; she's unable to paint anything other than the missing girls covered in tangled forest-scapes and is tortured by hallucinations of Vivian. When Franny Harris-White, Camp Nightingale's owner, asks her to return as the art instructor for the camp's reopening, Emma agrees, determined to finally uncover what happened to her friends. Her return to the camp brings back the past in full force: Emma is assigned to her old cabin with three girls painfully reminiscent of her friends; her sightings of Vivian intensify; and everyone, from the Harris-Whites to the camp's staff, views her with suspicion. Through the lens of Emma's growing paranoia, whispered campfire tales of the massacre buried in Camp Nightingale's past gain horrifying significance. Sager's second thriller is as tense and twisty as his best-selling Final Girls (2017), but this one is even more polished, with gut-wrenching plot surprises skillfully camouflaged by Emma's paranoia and confusion, the increasingly creepy setting, and a cast of intriguingly secretive characters.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The pseudonymous Sager follows his well-received debut, 2017's Final Girls, with another gripping thriller. Tragedy strikes Camp Nightingale in Upstate New York when three girls vanish from their cabin in the middle of the night, leaving their younger roommate, Emma Davis, behind. Fifteen years later, Emma-an artist who constantly relives their disappearance through her paintings-is determined to uncover the mystery of her friends' fate. When Camp Nightingale reopens for the first time since that summer, she returns as an instructor and is haunted by the past and possibly something even more sinister. Suspicion abounds as Emma's memories of that summer lead her to hidden clues left behind in the wake of the girls' disappearance. Sager intricately interweaves the past and present as Emma investigates further, realizing that not everyone she once knew can be trusted. A major twist toward the end compensates for the triteness of one of the big reveals. Sager remains a writer to watch. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Haunted by memories of fellow campers who went missing 15 years before, Emma Davis is now a successful artist thriving in New York City. Her paintings channel the mysterious events of that harrowing summer at Camp Nightingale, which to this date have never been solved. When Emma serendipitously gets the opportunity to return to Nightingale as an arts teacher and counselor, she reluctantly accepts in hopes that she can uncover the truth of the missing girls. Chapters alternate between the present and 15 years earlier, all told from the perspective of Emma, who reveals herself as an unreliable narrator making readers wary of what to believe. Atmospheric and foreboding, the story unfolds much like an on-screen thriller filled with nods to the horror genre. Verdict Reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this tension-building sophomore release from Sager (Final Girls) offers dizzying twists and makes for a fun summer read. Recommended for mystery, psychological fiction, and thriller fans. [See Prepub Alert, 2/1/18.]-Carolann Curry, Mercer Univ. Lib., Macon, GA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she's offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She's ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It's so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel's setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it's hard to believe that the camp's owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelationswhen they comeare hardly worth the wait. And it's hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma's first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn't be amply prepared for her first period, but that's what Sager wants readers to think. There's a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80snot so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.Sophomore slump. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1 I paint the girls in the same order. Vivian first. Then Natalie. Allison is last, even though she was first to leave the cabin and therefore technically the first to disappear. My paintings are typically large. Massive, really. As big as a barn door, Randall likes to say. Yet the girls are always small. Inconsequential marks on a canvas that's alarmingly wide. Their arrival heralds the second stage of a painting, after I've laid down a background of earth and sky in hues with appropriately dark names. Spider black. Shadow gray. Blood red. And midnight blue, of course. In my paintings, there's always a bit of midnight. Then come the girls, sometimes clustered together, sometimes scattered to far-flung corners of the canvas. I put them in white dresses that flare at the hems, as if they're running from something. They're usually turned so all that can be seen of them is their hair trailing behind them as they flee. On the rare occasions when I do paint a glimpse of their faces, it's only the slimmest of profiles, nothing more than a single curved brushstroke. I create the woods last, using a putty knife to slather paint onto the canvas in wide, unwieldy strokes. This process can take days, even weeks, me slightly dizzy from fumes as I glob on more paint, layer upon layer, keeping it thick. I've heard Randall boast to potential buyers that my surfaces are like Van Gogh's, with paint cresting as high as an inch off the canvas. I prefer to think I paint like nature, where true smoothness is a myth, especially in the woods. The chipped ridges of tree bark. The speckle of moss on rock. Several autumns' worth of leaves coating the ground. That's the nature I try to capture with my scrapes and bumps and whorls of paint. So I add more and more, each wall-size canvas slowly succumbing to the forest of my imagination. Thick. Forbidding. Crowded with danger. The trees loom, dark and menacing. Vines don't creep so much as coil, their loops tightening into choke holds. Underbrush covers the forest floor. Leaves blot out the sky. I paint until there's not a bare patch left on the canvas and the girls have been consumed by the forest, buried among the trees and vines and leaves, rendered invisible. Only then do I know a painting is finished, using the tip of a brush handle to swirl my name into the lower right-hand corner. Emma Davis. That same name, in that same borderline-illegible script, now graces a wall of the gallery, greeting visitors as they pass through the hulking sliding doors of this former warehouse in the Meatpacking District. Every other wall is filled with paintings. My paintings. Twenty-seven of them. My first gallery show. Randall has gone all out for the opening party, turning the place into a sort of urban forest. There are rust-colored walls and birch trees cut from a forest in New Jersey arranged in tasteful clumps. Ethereal house music throbs discreetly in the background. The lighting suggests October even though it's a week until St. Patrick's Day and outside the streets are piled with dirty slush. The gallery is packed, though. I'll give Randall that. Collectors, critics, and lookyloos elbow for space in front of the canvases, champagne glasses in hand, reaching every so often for the mushroom-and-goat-cheese croquettes that float by. Already I've been introduced to dozens of people whose names I've instantly forgotten. People of importance. Important enough for Randall to whisper who they are in my ear as I shake their hands. "From the Times," he says of a woman dressed head to toe in shades of purple. Of a man in an impeccably tailored suit and bright red sneakers, he simply whispers, "Christie's." "Very impressive work," Mr. Christie's says, giving me a crooked smile. "They're so bold." There's surprise in his voice, as if women are somehow incapable of boldness. Or maybe his surprise stems from the fact that, in person, I'm anything but bold. Compared with other outsize personalities in the art world, I'm positively demure. No all-purple ensemble or flashy footwear for me. Tonight's little black dress and black pumps with a kitten heel are as fancy as I get. Most days I dress in the same combination of khakis and paint-specked T-shirts. My only jewelry is the silver charm bracelet always wrapped around my left wrist. Hanging from it are three charms-tiny birds made of brushed pewter. I once told Randall I dress so plainly because I want my paintings to stand out and not the other way around. In truth, boldness in one's personality and appearance seems futile to me. Vivian was bold in every way. It didn't keep her from disappearing. During these meet and greets, I smile as wide as instructed, accept compliments, coyly defer the inevitable questions about what I plan to do next. Once Randall has exhausted his supply of strangers to introduce, I hang back from the crowd, willing myself not to check each painting for the telltale red sticker signaling it's been sold. Instead, I nurse a glass of champagne in a corner, the branch of a recently deforested birch tapping against my shoulder as I look around the room for people I actually know. There are many, which makes me grateful, even though it's strange seeing them together in the same place. High school friends mingling with coworkers from the ad agency, fellow painters standing next to relatives who took the train in from Connecticut. All of them, save for a single cousin, are men. That's not entirely an accident. I perk up once Marc arrives fashionably late, sporting a proud grin as he surveys the scene. Although he claims to loathe the art world, Marc fits in perfectly. Bearded with adorably mussed hair. A plaid sport coat thrown over his worn Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Red sneakers that make Mr. Christie's do a disappointed double take. Passing through the crowd, Marc snags a glass of champagne and one of the croquettes, which he pops into his mouth and chews thoughtfully. "The cheese saves it," he informs me. "But those watery mushrooms are a major infraction." "I haven't tried one yet," I say. "Too nervous." Marc puts a hand on my shoulder, steadying me. Just like he used to do when we lived together during art school. Every person, especially artists, needs a calming influence. For me, that person is Marc Stewart. My voice of reason. My best friend. My probable husband if not for the fact that we both like men. I'm drawn to the romantically unattainable. Again, not a coincidence. "You're allowed to enjoy this, you know," he says. "I know." "And you can be proud of yourself. There's no need to feel guilty. Artists are supposed to be inspired by life experiences. That's what creativity is all about." Marc's talking about the girls, of course. Buried inside every painting. Other than me, only he knows about their existence. The only thing I haven't told him is why, fifteen years later, I continue to make them vanish over and over. That's one thing he's better off not knowing. I never intended to paint this way. In art school, I was drawn to simplicity in both color and form. Andy Warhol's soup cans. Jasper Johns's flags. Piet Mondrian's bold squares and rigid black lines. Then came an assignment to paint a portrait of someone I knew who had died. I chose the girls. I painted Vivian first, because she burned brightest in my memory. That blond hair right out of a shampoo ad. Those incongruously dark eyes that looked black in the right light. The pert nose sprayed with freckles brought out by the sun. I put her in a white dress with an elaborate Victorian collar fanning around her swanlike neck and gave her the same enigmatic smile she displayed on her way out of the cabin. You're too young for this, Em. Natalie came next. High forehead. Square chin. Hair pulled tight in a ponytail. Her white dress got a dainty lace collar that downplayed her thick neck and broad shoulders. Finally, there was Allison, with her wholesome look. Apple cheeks and slender nose. Brows two shades darker than her flaxen hair, so thin and perfect they looked like they had been drawn on with brown pencil. I painted an Elizabethan ruff around her neck, frilly and regal. Yet there was something wrong with the finished painting. Something that gnawed at me until the night before the project was due, when I awoke at 2:00 a.m. and saw the three of them staring at me from across the room. Seeing them. That was the problem. I crept out of bed and approached the canvas. I grabbed a brush, dabbed it in some brown paint, and smeared a line over their eyes. A tree branch, blinding them. More branches followed. Then plants and vines and whole trees, all of them gliding off the brush onto the canvas, as if sprouting there. By dawn, most of the canvas had been besieged by forest. All that remained of Vivian, Natalie, and Allison were shreds of their white dresses, patches of skin, locks of hair. That became No. 1. The first in my forest series. The only one where even a fraction of the girls is visible. That piece, which got the highest grade in the class after I explained its meaning to my instructor, is absent from the gallery show. It hangs in my loft, not for sale. Most of the others are here, though, with each painting taking up a full wall of the multichambered gallery. Seeing them together like this, with their gnarled branches and vibrant leaves, makes me realize how obsessive the whole endeavor is. Knowing I've spent years painting the same subject unnerves me. "I am proud," I tell Marc before taking a sip of champagne. He downs his glass in one gulp and grabs a fresh one. "Then what's up? You seem vexed." He says it with a reedy British accent, a dead-on impersonation of Vincent Price in that campy horror movie neither of us can remember the name of. All we know is that we were stoned when we watched it on TV one night, and the line made us howl with laughter. We say it to each other far too often. "It's just weird. All of this." I use my champagne flute to gesture at the paintings dominating the walls, the people lined up in front of them, Randall kissing both cheeks of a svelte European couple who just walked through the door. "I never expected any of this." I'm not being humble. It's the truth. If I had expected a gallery show, I would have actually named my work. Instead, I simply numbered them in the order they were painted. No. 1 through No. 33. Randall, the gallery, this surreal opening reception-all of it is a happy accident. The product of being in the right place at the right time. That right place, incidentally, was Marc's bistro in the West Village. At the time, I was in my fourth year of being the in-house artist at an ad agency. It was neither enjoyable nor fulfilling, but it paid the rent on a crumbling loft big enough to fit my forest canvases. After an overhead pipe leaked into the bistro, Marc needed something to temporarily mask a wall's worth of water damage. I loaned him No. 8 because it was the biggest and able to cover the most square footage. That right time was a week later, when the owner of a small gallery a few blocks away popped into Marc's place for lunch. He saw the painting, was suitably intrigued, and asked Marc about the artist. That led to one of my paintings-No. 7-being displayed in the gallery. It sold within a week. The owner asked for more. I gave him three. One of the paintings-lucky No. 13-caught the eye of a young art lover who posted a picture of it on Instagram. That picture was noticed by her employer, a television actress known for setting trends. She bought the painting and hung it in her dining room, showing it off during a dinner party for a small group of friends. One of those friends, an editor at Vogue, told his cousin, the owner of a larger, more prestigious gallery. That cousin is Randall, who currently roams the gallery, coiling his arms around every guest he sees. What none of them knows-not Randall, not the actress, not even Marc-is that those thirty-three canvases are the only things I've painted outside my duties at the ad agency. There are no fresh ideas percolating in this artist's brain, no inspiration sparking me into productivity. I've attempted other things, of course, more from a nagging sense of responsibility than actual desire. But I'm never able to move beyond those initial, halfhearted efforts. I return to the girls every damn time. I know I can't keep painting them, losing them in the woods again and again. To that end, I've vowed not to paint another. There won't be a No. 34 or a No. 46 or, God forbid, a No. 112. That's why I don't answer when everyone asks me what I'm working on next. I have no answer to give. My future is quite literally a blank canvas, waiting for me to fill it. The only thing I've painted in the past six months is my studio, using a roller to convert it from daffodil yellow to robin's-egg blue. If there's anything vexing me, it's that. I'm a one-hit wonder. A bold lady painter whose life's work is on these walls. As a result, I feel helpless when Marc leaves my side to chat up a handsome cater waiter, giving Randall the perfect moment to clutch my wrist and drag me to a slender woman studying No. 30, my largest work to date. Although I can't see the woman's face, I know she's important. Everyone else I've met tonight has been guided to me instead of the other way around. "Here she is, darling," Randall announces. "The artist herself." The woman whirls around, fixing me with a friendly, green-eyed gaze I haven't seen in fifteen years. It's a look you easily remember. The kind of gaze that, when aimed at you, makes you feel like the most important person in the world. Excerpted from The Last Time I Lied: A Novel by Riley Sager All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.