I finally picked up Never Lie last week, and I have to say, it completely messed with my head. I actually picked this one up because a friend recommended it to me. I started it just before bed, thinking
I’d read a few pages, but ended up staying up half the night. Freida McFadden really knows how to pull you in with that eerie, slow-building tension that feels almost too real.
It’s funny, while reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about this trip I took a few years ago with friends. We’d rented this old cabin, and the weather turned awful halfway through the stay. The Wi-Fi died, the power flickered, and for hours it was just us, rain hammering on the windows, with the woods outside completely silent.
That house from the trip is exactly how I imagined Dr. Adrienne Hale’s house in the book, the isolation, the unease, the feeling that something could be hiding behind any door.
The book’s setup is simple,
a couple trapped in a snowstorm, stumbling upon the house of a missing psychiatrist, but the execution? Terrifyingly good. Every room in that house felt like a clue, and McFadden somehow makes you doubt everyone and everything, even your own instincts. It reminded me a little of The Last Mrs. Parrish, another psychological thriller I read earlier this year. Both play with perspective in such a sneaky way, you think you understand what’s happening until one chapter flips everything upside down.
What I really liked about Never Lie was how claustrophobic it felt. You’re stuck in that house with the characters, trying to piece together the mystery. And that final reveal, I won’t spoil it, but it made me close the book and just sit there for a minute, rethinking the entire story.
If you’ve ever stayed somewhere isolated, like a cabin, a homestay, even a quiet Airbnb in the hills, and let your imagination run wild, this book will hit differently. For me, it wasn’t just a thriller; it felt like reliving a memory…. only darker.
“Sometimes the person you trust most is the one who built the cage around you.”
from Freida McFadden’s Never Lie
