The better liar A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Leslie Voigt hasn't spoken to her sister, Robin, in over 10 years. Wild-child Robin ran away as a teenager while older, steadier Leslie settled down to suburban married life. But when their father dies, Leslie learns that his will specifies that she can receive her part of a large inheritance only if the sisters reunite. Leslie manages to track down Robin, living under an assumed name in Las Vegas . . . or at least, she was. When Leslie arrives at her sister's grimy apartment, she discovers Robin dead from a likely overdose. Frightened and confused, Leslie can't bear to claim the body and runs. On her way out of town, however, she meets Mary, an actress wannabe with similar features as Robin, who is also looking to get out of town in a hurry. Both women are desperate enough to try to pass Mary off as Robin so they can split the money. What could possibly go wrong? Jones' debut novel is clever, absorbing, and full of red herrings. No one is trustworthy Leslie is hiding her reasons for needing the money; Mary has ulterior motives and rarely tells the truth. A stunning twist ending will leave readers waiting to see what Jones will give them next.--Rebecca Vnuk Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Jones debuts with a taut, twisty thriller. For the past two months, Leslie Voigt Flores, an accountant, wife, and mother in Albuquerque, N.Mex., has been desperately trying to track down her little sister, Robin Voigt--the black sheep who left home 10 years earlier at 16--so that Leslie can collect $50,000 from their father's estate. Under the terms of the will, no funds can be dispersed without both siblings being present, a condition designed to force the two to reconcile. After hitting an apparent dead end in Nevada, Leslie runs into a vivacious young woman with an eerie resemblance to Robin, a server/actor wannabe who introduces herself as Mary. The pair return to New Mexico to play out a two-handed con, with Mary pretending to be Robin. The author sneakily builds suspense via a trio of narrators--Leslie, Mary, and Robin--none of them reliable. Though the novel falters at the finale when its big reveal comes across as less convincing than the characters' previous lies, readers won't feel cheated. Jones arrives with an undeniable splash. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (Jan.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT Leslie's search for her estranged sister Robin comes to a disappointing end when she discovers her dead body, clearly the result of a drug overdose. A clause in their father's will requires that both sisters appear in person in order to claim their inheritance, and Leslie is desperate for the money. On her trip back home to her husband and baby, Leslie runs into Mary, a waitress who bears a striking resemblance to Robin. Leslie makes Mary an extraordinary offer: to pose as her sister and claim Robin's half of the money. Recently fired from her job, Mary has nothing to lose and agrees to help Leslie, but she quickly discovers that Leslie is not telling her the truth, though Mary has secrets of her own. VERDICT Debut author Jones has created a taut psychological suspense with surprising developments and a shocking, jaw-dropping ending. Sure to be popular with fans of Ruth Ware and Gillian Flynn.--Joy Gunn, Paseo Verde Lib., Henderson, NV

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A darkly complex relationship between two sisters lies at the heart of Jones' debut psychological thriller.Leslie Flores has a problem. For the past seven years, she's taken care of her father as he wasted away from thyroid cancer in New Mexico. Now that he's died, Leslie must sort out his estate by herself since her younger sister, Robin, fled the family home a decade ago, when she was 16, checking in only when she needed moneywhich her father, to Leslie's frustration, would send her. But it turns out that their father split the $100,000 he left behind between Leslie and Robin, saying they would have to appear together at his lawyer's office in Albuquerque to collect it. Leslie needs that money and is determined to get it at any cost, and she manages to track Robin down. Her plan to bring her sister home hits a snag, though, when she finds Robin's body in her squalid rented room in Las Vegas. Instead of calling the authorities, Leslie leaves the scene. A possible solution to Leslie's new problem arrives in the form of waitress/aspiring actress Mary, whom Leslie meets outside a Vegas restaurant. They strike up a conversation, which eventually leads to a proposition. Mary looks a bit like Robin, so Leslie asks her to put her acting skills to good use and pose as Robin to help her collect the inheritance, offering Mary half the money for her trouble. One dye job later and Mary, posing as Robin, accompanies Leslie to Albuquerque to meet her husband, Dave, and their little boy, Eli. Leslie's scheme should go off without a hitch, but she didn't count on the dangerously magnetic and quietly cunning Mary using her new persona to dig into Robin's life (and then some), Leslie's marriageand her secrets. Readers also get a disturbing look at the sisters' strange bond and the circumstances surrounding their mother's death. Of particular note is Jones' depiction of how Leslie's relationship with her troubled mother indelibly influenced how she relates to Eli. A nicely noir, if not completely surprising, couple of twists round out this feverish thriller.A blistering debut from a promising new talent. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Leslie By the time I found her she was dead. I groped for somewhere to sit down. The only place other than the bed, where the body lay, was a wooden dining-­room chair half-­buried under a pile of wrinkled clothes. It had a cushion hanging off the seat, patterned with cartoon bees, and as I moved to straighten it a cockroach, startled by the movement, hurried up the chair leg. I jerked my hand back and closed my eyes. Then I opened them again--­helplessly. I didn't want to look at the body. The body--­Robin--­Rachel. I'd never seen her as an adult, but as a teenager she'd been round-­faced, milk-­fed. Now she was so thin as to be impossible to look at. My vision unfocused itself when it encountered her ribs, visible through both the fabric of her runnin' rebels T-­shirt and the sheet in which most of her body below the shoulders was tangled. Her hipbones, too, projected, cradling the vacant, starved abdomen. A little vomit had dried in the corner of her mouth and on her tongue, the color of burned things. She had been unconscious when she'd choked on it. Iker was panicking. "Should I call the police?" he said, directing his gaze at the close yellow walls, the popcorn ceiling. "I'm really sorry about this, I'm so sorry. I'll call the police. I'll call." He wore a white polo with the logo of the housing company on it. Crescent-­shaped sweat stains gathered underneath his sagging pectoral muscles, like a pair of closed eyes. They twitched as he began digging in the pockets of his khaki pants for his cellphone. "No," I said, trying to think fast. "No, I'll call. You go outside. I just want--­" I swallowed. "I just want to be with her for a minute." "Yeah," Iker said, wiping his upper lip. "Okay. Okay. I'll wait. Outside. I'll be . . ." He pointed. "I'll be right down there if you need me." He went down the stairs into the living room below, taking his proprietor's key but leaving the door ajar. After a minute I could hear him shuffling on the front porch, audible through the mosquito screen on the open window. She was still on the bed. The fact of her was as sweltering as the room. In my imagination I reached for my phone. In another version, I didn't. I lived these two visions simultaneously for several long minutes, my hand twitching in the air above my purse, unable to choose between them. If I called the police, then Robin would be dead--­absolutely dead. Legally, governmentally dead. I would have to identify her, and arrange somehow to take her body back to Albuquerque to be buried, and have a funeral, and then everyone would know she was dead and it would be over. I could contest, maybe--­but contesting could take a year or more. I couldn't wait a year. If I didn't call the police, then she would still be dead, but--­ I took her wallet off the dresser and looked at her ID. "Rachel Vreeland" stared out at me from the hypersaturated photograph. She'd been pretty as an adult, the pale skin I remembered from childhood turned slightly orange by the sun or the DMV's printer. 5'-­09", the text next to her face said. Eyes: BRO . Her real name wasn't anywhere in the wallet, or anywhere in the rest of the room. She had a lot of stuff, but most of it was clothes, strewn across the floor and piled in the closet. I picked through the items with pockets, careful of cockroaches, but turned up only old movie tickets and gas-­station receipts. The walls were covered in movie posters and a corkboard with photographs of friends with red Solo cups, a scruffy orange cat, a long-­lost boyfriend from whenever the last time was she was weighty enough to crush to his side while he held the camera out in front of them. The dresser drawers held dozens of bottles of disintegrating nail polish and depleted pans of eye shadow. At least fifty pairs of underwear, which I pushed aside with a clothes hanger, scraping the bottom of the drawer: nothing underneath. I shook out each of her shoes next--­cowboy boots, Toms, slip-­on sneakers--­turning the left and then the right upside down. Something fell out of the right one. I'd been expecting Robin's real ID, or maybe a baggie, so the anticlimax startled me: a pair of pearl earrings, so light that they made barely any noise against the carpeted floor. For a moment I thought they must be insects, moths, alive inside Robin's shoes, and their brief bouncing trajectory across the floor was translated by my gaze as mad, frenzied flapping; then I blinked, and they resolved into dead objects. It took me several seconds to realize why I was staring at them. When it came to me I snatched them up so quickly that my fingernails scraped the carpet. My mother's earrings. Five-­pointed, like stars, each seed grasped by a minuscule gold claw. I hadn't seen them since I was a little girl. I suppose I thought they'd been buried with her, or my father had sold them. But here they were in Robin's cramped rented room in Las Vegas. Had Daddy given them to her and never told me? He wouldn't have done that. She didn't deserve them. I was the one who'd made his doctors' appointments, helped him swallow, taken him to the movies every Sunday. Robin had done nothing but call occasionally, after she turned sixteen and disappeared. He hadn't given them to her. Probably she'd stolen them the night she left. She'd taken forty dollars out of my purse that night too. I rubbed my thumb along the surface of the pearls, feeling several faint scratches on the curvature of one of the seeds, invisible to the eye but evident to the touch. Pearls were easily scratched. My grandmother had taught us to polish her pearl jewelry with olive oil and a chamois cloth, pushing our cloth-­covered fingernails into the crevices where each pearl was secured. But Robin was careless. I closed my fingers around the earrings. The backings dug into my palm like children's teeth. If I didn't call the police, Robin Voigt could stay Rachel Vreeland. Rachel Vreeland could have a crappy City of Las Vegas burial, a heroin addict with no family, the person she had chosen to be when she was sixteen. It gave me a thick, sick pleasure to think about. I wanted her to be alone in the ground. But it wouldn't matter. Either way, I couldn't get what I needed from her. She would have loved that. I had been in the room with her body for almost five minutes now. The pacing on the porch had stopped; Iker was considering whether to come back upstairs for me. There was a series of faint rusty creaks as someone else came up the second set of stairs, which clung to the siding on the rear of the house, allowing access to the upper floor from the backyard. Whoever had come in went into the second bedroom and slammed the door. Her roommate. Yes. Iker had said there was another tenant. I heard the muffled noises of quick movement from the second bedroom. The roommate could come into the hall at any moment and see me--­see Robin's body--­wonder where the police were, who I was, why Iker hadn't called--­ The front door opened into the house, and Iker's voice came floating up the inner stairs. "Miss, um . . . Leslie? Did you . . . Leslie . . . ?" I didn't reach for my phone. I slipped the earrings into my purse and walked quickly toward the back door. I was out before anyone saw me, making as little sound as I could manage on the metal stairs. At the noise of the ignition, Iker ran back out onto the front porch, waving his arm at me to stop. He shouted something after me, something I couldn't hear as I drove away. Excerpted from The Better Liar: A Novel by Tanen Jones 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.

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