Stevie‘s review of The Darkest Lie by Pintip Dunn
Young Adult Romantic Mystery published by Kensington 28 Jun 16
Losing a parent has to be one of the most devastating events that can impact a teenager. However, losing a parent in combination with the revelation that everything you believed about them was apparently a lie has to be many times worse. That’s the situation Cecelia finds herself in as she prepares to enter her senior year of high school. Her mother has been found dead – in what everyone believes to have been a suicide – shortly after a male student, a promising football player, reported that he was in a relationship with her. Now, Cecelia must force herself to carry on as normal while her father is barely functioning in his parental role and her paternal grandmother – a professional poker player – has moved into the family home to take care of them both. If all that wasn’t enough to cope with, Cecelia has to deal with hostility from her classmates, and from those members of the football team yet to move on to college or who are attending college in their home town. Fortunately, at least one member of her class seems to be on her side.
Sam Davidson and his sister are new in town. An aspiring journalist, Sam is keen to uncover the truth behind every story, although Cecelia sometimes doubts his motivations – since he’s also keen to win an internship on the local paper, and a big story about Cecelia’s mother might just be his way in. He does, however, have at least as chaotic a home life as she does, and when Cecelia starts to uncover evidence that her mother was murdered to prevent her exposing a sexual predator on the school staff, he is keen to help. Cecelia tries to trust Sam, but the more she finds out about the circumstances around her mother’s death, the more it appears that someone is stalking her. The suspects mount up to implicate a number of male teachers as the killer and sexual abuser, as well as several students and volunteers on an advice hotline as Cecelia’s stalker: the place her mother volunteered, and where Cecelia starts working after first discovering that her mother’s death is suspicious.
One of those volunteers is Liam, who seems interested in Cecelia, and provides the predicable other corner of a love triangle, but his past is also mysterious. Cecelia is torn over which guy she’s attracted too, and which of them may be working against her – or at least using the information they gain for his own advancement. There are also hints from the phone logs Cecelia’s mother kept, from calls Cecelia receives at the hotline, and from comments made by Sam’s sister that the sexual predator is operating on the high school campus as he did when Cecelia’s mother was a student there, and that one of his targets is Sam’s sister.
I love the clues that Cecelia’s mother left for her at the hotline and in other places, and the way innocuous comments and events elsewhere help her figure out what they mean. I am less impressed with the final reveal of the villain’s identity (which I’d sussed several chapters earlier) and the way in which the tension is ramped up then dissipated alongside that reveal. I’d like to see more three-dimensional villains in romantic suspense, without implying that the bad guy is somehow unhinged at the end.
Overall, fairly average for the genre, unfortunately.
Grade: C
Summary:
“The mother I knew would never do those things. But maybe I never knew her after all.”
Clothes, jokes, coded messages… Cecilia Brooks and her mom shared everything. At least, CeCe thought they did. Six months ago, her mom killed herself after accusations of having sex with a student, and CeCe’s been the subject of whispers and taunts ever since. Now, at the start of her high school senior year, between dealing with her grieving, distracted father, and the social nightmare that has become her life, CeCe just wants to fly under the radar. Instead, she’s volunteering at the school’s crisis hotline—the same place her mother worked.
As she counsels troubled strangers, CeCe’s lingering suspicions about her mom’s death resurface. With the help of Sam, a new student and newspaper intern, she starts to piece together fragmented clues that point to a twisted secret at the heart of her community. Soon, finding the truth isn’t just a matter of restoring her mother’s reputation, it’s about saving lives—including CeCe’s own…
No excerpt available.
