Everyone here is lying: Not a great introduction to Shari Lapena

I've seen Shari Lapena's books lying about my local library and I know she's a popular Canadian author. Lapena was a lawyer and an English teacher before becoming a novelist. She has published ten bestselling novels to date. I managed to get hold of a copy of her 2023 book, Everyone here is lying. Here's my review. (Spoiler alert: I didn't like the book.)

Everyone here is lying | Published July 2023 | Read September 2024

Here's the premise of the book: William Wooler is a family man on the surface, but he's been having an affair. The novel opens with William ending the affair (badly) in a seedy motel room. William returns home early from work, upset and angry, only to find his nine-year-old daughter Avery unexpectedly home from school after being dismissed from choir practice for disruptive behaviour. William loses his temper with Avery and hours later she goes missing.

Sounds intriguing, right? Sure, if the story is well executed. Sadly, Everyone here is lying is a locked room mystery that fails to deliver. On top of that, the book is full of tropes. Avery goes missing in a small, exclusive neighbourhood and of course all the neighbours have secrets, it's just a matter of working through all of them to find the guilty party. I wasn't invested in the outcome and I couldn't connect to the story. It isn't a particularly intriguing or interesting journey to roll through all the possible suspects. There is also no world-building and very little context for the Wooler family before the story jumps into Avery's disappearance.

I know you have to suspend disbelief when reading thrillers, but Everyone here is lying required too much of me on that front. This isn't due to a bonkers ending or over-the-top plotting. The story is set up as a simple disappearance of a child, but the plot needs to match with that scenario. It doesn't.

First off, Avery is dismissed from school but no parent is advised and she walks home alone. That should NOT happen. Avery, while clearly an intelligent child, exhibits thought processes through the whole book that are WAY above the level of a 9-year-old. Has Lapena never interacted with children? Avery's characterisation threw me from the outset. It might work work better if she was older. The throwing of neurodivergence together with a personality disorder is jarring and I loathed that part of the book.

The police are completely inept up to the point of caricature. William tells a stupid lie to cover his affair and seems to care more about its exposure than finding his daughter. Some of the so-called secrets of the suspected neighbours when revealed, are just plain silly, so the locked room approach doesn't work. I didn't like any of the characters so there was no one to root for. There is even one female character pretending to have been abused. The final bit of action is completely ridiculous. Thinking about it further, it feels like Lapena thinks her readers are idiots.

So, it's a hard pass for me on this author, unless I can muster up the courage to give another of her books a go.

Rating: ⭐