Please Don't Lie Fails as a Mystery/Thriller

 

 

PLEASE DON’T LIE (2025)

By Christina Baker Kline and Anne Burt

Thomas and Mercer, 259 pages

★★ ½

 

It’s true that, in general, mysteries are more popular than most forms of fiction. It’s also true that being a great novelist doesn’t necessarily mean you can write any subgenre. Nor it is it the case that two heads are guaranteed to be better than one when writing a novel. Most novelists I know are solitary creatures who are only a lot of fun when they are not stapled to their writing desks.

 

I’ve read numerous Christina Baker Kline novels and enjoyed them all–until now. Anne Burt has but one novel, which I have not read. I will say from the outset that mystery does not seem to be Ms. Kline’s forte. Please Don’t Lie is a paint-by-the-numbers mystery/thriller that’s neither hard to unravel nor stirring. Its protagonist is New Yorker Hayley Stone, who is dealing with two heartbreaks. First, her parents perish in a fire that destroys their home, which is followed by her sister Jenna’s fatal overdose. She suddenly finds herself quite wealthy and is being harassed by muckraking journalist Olivia Blackwell, ostensibly to tell “her story,” but Blackwell acts like a crass muckraker. Alas, some of Hayley’s fair-weather friends spill some tea.

 

At her sister’s funeral she meets Brandon, a hunk who promises to get her out of the limelight. Before you can spell contrivance, Hayley and Brandon are having hot sex and marry. Okay… it takes the proverbial New York minute to suspect that Hayley and Brandon are wrong for each other. She’s a hardcore New Yorker who hangs out in cafes with former work friends and Emily, her bestie. Brandon’s an upstate country boy who convinces Hayley that they should move to his childhood home high up on a ridge in the Adirondacks above the village of Crystal River. He insists that all they need is each other, but bright autumn leaves, baking bread, making jam, canning food for winter, and spooky (to her)  coyote visits are  no cure for loneliness. Plus, a few locals know Brandon and are not exactly happy to see him. One of them, a crusty older woman named Cheryl is especially antagonistic and insists that the fancy dream home in which Brandon and Hayley are living was built by her father, not Brandon’s.  Brandon is appointing their nest with Hayley’s money and disappears regularly to go hunting during the night.

 

Hayley’s only solace is Megan, a young woman who seems as if she walked off of a Sixties’ commune (vegan, hippie garb, yogini, animal rights activist). She’s partnered with Tyler, who Brandon doesn’t seem to like. Then again, he doesn’t seem to like anyone other than his unnamed hunting buddies, though he and Hayley have a lot of “make-up sex.” When the rundown apartment Megan and Tyler are renting becomes uninhabitable, Hayley invites them to live in the rental cabin on their property. When Emily visits from New York it takes her a half of a New York minute to see that Brandon is a creep and that Hayley is miserable. And it doesn’t take long for Emily to discover why Cheryl hates Brandon and why other locals steer clear. A dinner with Megan and Tyler leads to a truth or dare game that sends Brandon into orbit.

 

You name the convention and it’s in Please Don’t Lie: poor cellphone coverage, a disappearance, a mutilated animal left on the lawn, suspicion cast upon Tyler and Megan, another phone call from Olivia, Internet conspiracy nuts, and Hayley’s constant fear she’s being lied to. (We could have told her that!) All of this leads to Hayley’s flight for her life on an icy, snowy evening. Some thunder snow would have been the cherry atop the formula.

 

Hayley Stone has got to be one the dumbest protagonists over the age of 18 in recent publishing. There are no likable characters in this novel and there are certainly no candidates for Mensa membership. Not even Emily, who decided to go on a late-in-the-season solo hike in the Adirondacks. My two-star rating is because I finished the novel to see how it resolved, though I was pretty certain how it would happen. I was right, so that’s on me. I didn’t see  the “happy” ending coming, but I didn’t buy it for a New York second. A second Crystal River book is planned. I’m not sure that’s wise.

 

Rob Weir