One year ago, Caroline Johnson chose to end her life brutally: a shocking suicide planned to match that of her husband just months before. Their daughter, Anna, has struggled to come to terms with their loss ever since.

Now with a young baby of her own, Anna misses her mother more than ever and starts to ask questions about her parents’ deaths. But by digging up the past, is she putting her future in danger?

From the beginning, ‘Let Me LIe‘ felt a little odd to me in an uncomfortable way. I was suprised to find that it was a cross-genre mashup. For me, those either succeed spectacularly of the fail early. This was the latter.

 I was taken aback by my reaction to the book. I’ll happily read stories about werewolves, vampires, fae and mythological gods, yet, only a few chapters in, I was almost ready to set the book aside because it drew on (and twisted out of shape) the Catholic myths I was raised with. It had the main character’s dead mother breaking the rules and risking Purgatory by ‘coming back down‘ to stop her daughter from investigating things best left alone. For some reason, I couldn’t swallow that.

At 20% I set the book aside. The Eastbourne setting felt real but bland. The plot was OK. There was nothing awful about the writing. Unfortunately, I couldn’tconnect with and didn’t care about either the young woman who was investigating her mother’s alleged suicide or the retired policeman who was helping her.  Most of all, I couldn’t take the ‘dead mother returning to Earth to help her daughter‘ plot seriously.