The double murder of a married couple in a small Washington town draws FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto into an investigation that mirrors a decades-old crime. Twenty-five years ago—to the day—Alex Parker murdered his parents, then took his own life, leaving behind a note admitting everything.
Raisa, paired with forensic psychologist Callum Kilkenny, uses her skills to read between the lines. Especially now that paranoid postings on a conspiracy thread suggest that Alex was a victim himself—theories that have piqued the interest of a perceptive content moderator and a true-crime podcaster eager for a big break.
As old and new crimes converge, messages from the living and the confessions of the dead take on new meaning for Raisa. Something more sinister than a copycat crime is at play, and plundering the darkest corners of a killer’s mind leaves her vulnerable to a deadly twist even she never saw coming.

‘The Lies You Wrote‘ is the fifth Brianna Labuskes book that I’ve read and I think it’s one of her best.

By now, I know what to expect from one of her novels but that doesn’t diminish their impact. It just gives me a reason to keep coming back. Her thrillers are a rollercoaster ride for the reader. They launch you into a bizarre situation, populated with larger-than-life characters and then toss you around curves in the plot that keep me off-balance but also keep me excited and curious.

‘The LIes You Wrote‘ is an excellent example of what Brianna Lambuskes can do and I strongly recommend it. 

The story is told from two points of view that mostly alternate between chapters. Still, between these points of view chapters, parts of the story are delivered as extracts from diaries, letters, newspaper articles, lectures, message threads on a true crime web forum and a true crime podcast. The chapters move backwards and forward in time but are anchored to and enhance the tension of an investigation into a multiple homicide in a small town in rural Washington that seems to be a copycat of a family murder-suicide in the same town twenty-five years earlier. 

The story starts from the point of view of Raisa Susanto, a young FBI agent with a strange speciality: she’s a forensic linguist who works a kind of magic that her colleagues have difficulty trusting but which she is passionate about. Her speciality is far from the most unusual thing about her. She’s a street kid from the care system who has fought her way to both academic success and begrudged but real prominence in the FBI. She’s a loner with trust issues and she also has guilty secrets. Just about everyone in this story does. 

The other point of view comes from Delaney Moore, a content moderator with the website Flick. She’s the one who draws the FBI’s attention to the video of the aftermath of the murder that the killer posted. She too has an unusual set of analytical talents, secrets in her past that she needs to keep hidden. She’s also obsessive about hunting sexual predators online. 

As Susanto struggles to solve the copycat killing, she starts to question whether the police who closed the original case, determining it to be a murder-suicide, had made a mistake and whether that mistake provied the impetus for the copycat murders on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original crime. 

There was a lot to love about this book. First and foremost, I became completely engaged in the mystery and had to make an effort to slow my reading and let myself think things through rather than rushing to the end to find out who had done what to whom and why. I stayed up late to finish this one and when I did, I went: “Wow! That makes perfect sense but I didn’t see it coming*.

I admired Brianna Lubuskes’ storytelling skills. She switches points of view, moves backwards and forwards in time and changes media and yet I was never confused Instead I was just drawn in deeper. There was no clunky exposition here, just what seemed to me to be a cheeky challenge to the reader: “Pay attention and try to keep up.”

I loved that almost all the action in this story is driven by women who have very strong personalities and, on the whole, a fairly poor experience with and opinion of men. 

I liked that is was seldom clear who, if anyone, was one of the good guys and that my understanding of the situation and the people in it altered again and again as new information was revealed, yet I never felt as if I’d been tricked, I just hadn’t put all the pieces together yet. 

I also learned some interesting things about forensic linguistics, especially the concept of idiolect. the unique way in which an individual uses language. As I came to understand the concept, I realised that my ideolect manifests as all the words, phrases and sentence constructions that Grammerly keeps telling me I should edit out of my writing. Once I started to listen for ideolects, I found them everywhere and I was even more impressed when I realised that Brianna Lubuskes had created ideolects for each of her main characters.

‘The Lies You Wrote‘ is the first book featuring Raisa Susanto. The second book ‘The Truth You Told‘ will be released in September 2024. I already have it on pre-order.