Let Me Lie

Author Clare Mackintosh is new to me, although she has published two previous suspense novels (I Let You Go and I See You), which I will definitely check into. This one had me going from the beginning and totally dropped me on my head at the end. The story is told alternately from the viewpoint of Anna Johnson, a new mother, Murray Mackenzie, a retired detective now working as a civilian in-take person at the local precinct, and a third unnamed person, who I assumed was Anna's not-really-dead father. Anna was stunned by her father's apparent suicide, supposedly witnessed and reported by a woman who saw him load his backpack with rocks and jump from a cliff into the sea. Anna's distraught mother, Caroline, followed him in the exact same manner within months. The trauma compelled her to seek help from a therapist, Mark Hemmings, who eventually became her lover (after appropriately referring her to another therapist) and then the father of her baby. Though Anna has not yet accepted his marriage proposal, they live together in Anna's childhood home. Anna is shocked into action when a message is dropped through the mail slot suggesting the suicides were, in fact, murders; she takes her fears to the local police and Murray decides to do a little checking on his own before he refers this to the active detectives. When Anna's supposedly dead mother resurfaces, with a new name and altered appearance, she tells Anna her father had faked the suicide to escape debt and forced her to go along. She further convinces Anna that her father had been an abusive alcoholic and that is why she, the mom, faked her own suicide and went into hiding. Anna is angry and overwhelmed that her parents have done this to her, but agrees to let her mom stay with her small family, pretending she is a long-lost cousin of her mom's. More threatening messages are delivered to the house and Anna believes that her father is threatening her family. Well developed secondary characters are Mackenzie's bipolar wife, Sarah, Anna's lifelong friend, Laura, and Anna's paternal uncle, Billy.
Reviews from Publishers Weekly and The Guardian.