Book Review: Sweet Little Lies

Author: Caz Frear

Publication Date: August 14, 2018

Publisher: Harper

In this gripping debut procedural, a young London policewoman must probe dark secrets buried deep in her own family’s past to solve a murder and a long-ago disappearance.

Your father is a liar. But is he a killer? 

Even liars tell the truth . . . sometimes.

Twenty-six-year-old Cat Kinsella overcame a troubled childhood to become a Detective Constable with the Metropolitan Police Force, but she’s never been able to banish these ghosts. When she’s called to the scene of a murder in Islington, not far from the pub her estranged father still runs, she discovers that Alice Lapaine, a young housewife who didn’t get out much, has been found strangled.

Cat and her team immediately suspect Alice’s husband, until she receives a mysterious phone call that links the victim to Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland eighteen years earlier. The call raises uneasy memories for Cat—her family met Maryanne while on holiday, right before she vanished. Though she was only a child, Cat knew that her charming but dissolute father wasn’t telling the truth when he denied knowing anything about Maryanne or her disappearance. Did her father do something to the teenage girl all those years ago? Could he have harmed Alice now? And how can you trust a liar even if he might be telling the truth?

Determined to close the two cases, Cat rushes headlong into the investigation, crossing ethical lines and trampling professional codes. But in looking into the past, she might not like what she finds. . . .

Cat Kinsella is one of the best leading protagonists that I have read this year. She is snarky, extremely witty, flawed (and knows it), and deals with her problems openly and honestly. What more could you ask for? I would not have wanted anyone else to tell me this story. Cat works for the London Metropolitan Police and is running from her past and her family, who she feels is concealing some murderous secrets.

The story starts off by providing some background details about Cat and her family’s previous life. Not long after the first chapter or so, Cat is brought in on a new murder case and it quickly becomes personal for her. She is such a strong female lead – a police detective is the perfect job for her. We learn bits and pieces about Cat as the story progresses – I felt that she, her family, and the victim were fully fleshed out characters. 

The writing in this novel was so spot on – I constantly felt as if I were inside a police station. I learned so much lingo and technical terms; it was great! Frear, the author, must have put in a lot of time learning police procedures, interactions with suspects, etc. With that being said, this author is from England, so some of the slang used was hard for me to follow at first, but I got used to it and caught on very quickly.  

The story goes back and forth between past and present – all narrated by Cat. Cat faces a lot of personal and professional conflict, both are written superbly and realistically. My only complaint with this novel is that at times the writing seemed to dredge on and the plot was slow developing. However, once the suspense showed up, everything went into full swing!

Problem is, while the lie may be sweet as it falls from your lips, the feeling in your gut is always putridly sour.

You had a sixty-five percent chance of fathering a child with your wife. There’s a sixty-three percent chance that you killer her.

The most devastating punishments aren’t always the legal ones.

***A free copy of this book was provided to me by the publishers at Harper in exchange for my honest review***