Lesley Kara #4: The dare (my least favourite to date)

I've now read four of the five books published to date by British thriller writer, Lesley Kara. See my post on the first two I read (The apartment upstairs and The other tenant) and for some background on the author. See also my review of Who did you tell? The three books I'd read previously were cracking reads, but I found The dare to be mediocre in comparison. Here are my thoughts.

The dare | Published February 2021 | Read March 2025

First of all, I am not sure why the book is called The dare as it's not about a dare, or at least a dare only features lightly in the story. The novel is actually the story of the traumatic death of Alice, Lizzie's best friend, when the girls were young. Lizzie suffers from epilepsy and has no recollection of what happened on the day Alice was killed by a train when they were playing near the tracks. Alice's family, and the whole town where the girls lived, blame Lizzie for Alice's death. Years later, Lizzie is still trying to move on, building a life for herself in London with her GP boyfriend and managing her epilepsy.

Kara's books to date have all interwoven the theme of the protagonist's possible involvement in the death of someone in the past and revenge-seeking for said involvement years later. The apartment upstairs is about the disappearance of Gina ten years previously and the cover-up of the crime, The other tenant is about the death of Marlow's friend in a fire at their school when they were teenagers, and Who did you tell? follows Astrid's recovery from alcoholism and past mistakes. Those books were beautifully crafted, but I did not find The dare in the same league. I commented on my review of The other tenant that Kara avoids inflating the premise and serving up a whackadoodle ending in her books. I felt that the books I'd read to that point showed how Kara had mastered the art of writing suspenseful stories with relatable characters in authentic situations. The endings weren't super shocking or surprising, and the strength of the books lay in the characterisations of the protagonists and the sympathy Kara garnered for them.

The elements that I loved in the three other Kara books were strangely absent in The dare. I couldn't warm to Lizzie the way that I did to Scarlett, Marlow, and Astrid in the other three books. Applying Kara's MO, I knew someone was out for revenge for Alice's death, but the story just didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The relationship between Lizzie and Alice's families was messy and the whole story was far-fetched.

I am still to read Kara's first novel, The rumour (2018) and I will give it a go, based on my four-star ratings of three out of four of her books.

Rating: ⭐⭐