Everyone Here Is Lying – Shari Lapena

Welcome to Stanhope. A safe neighborhood. A place for families.

William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he’s been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper.

Hours later, Avery’s family declares her missing.

Suddenly Stanhope doesn’t feel so safe. And William isn’t the only one on his street who’s hiding a lie. As witnesses come forward with information that may or may not be true, Avery’s neighbors become increasingly unhinged.

Who took Avery Wooler?

Review

I mean….

I was so excited to read this, I’m not gonna lie; it was almost everywhere last year, but I knew of it before it came out because I already knew Shari, of course, yk?

In general, in her books (and something that I actually really like), she takes a small cast of characters and weaves a web of twists that make sense for the story, and they’re just so good and rich in domestic drama and neighbour drama, and it’s just overall a great experience and a delightful extravaganza.

This is exactly what Everyone Here is Lying was gearing up to be. I actually called the biggest twist (I guess you could say). I called that! I was just like, of all of the characters, who could have done this? Who could have kidnapped this girl?? I was just doing detective work. Obviously, I didn’t figure out the other details, and this aspect absolutely doesn’t bother me at all. It’s not that I didn’t like the twist or the fact that I could see it coming, but I hated that the book just ended. Like, literally, “this just happened. Cut the scene.” Fade to black deadass.

Call me weird, but I kind of like to see when the “villain” gets what’s coming for them, or at least you can tell it will happen even if it’s like an open ending; at least you can tell that they are going to face consequences, but here it was just… it just finished.

Three stars honestly, the way the ending was written kind of ruined this for me. I did feel like my overall reading experience was squashed, and for me, it had the grounds to absolutely lower a whole star down of my rating. Had the book wrapped up final revelations any other way, like just the same key components but presented differently, it would have been a 3.5, 4 star read.

This is actually my first time leaving a Shari Lapena book disappointed. I hope the rest of her works are going to continue my trend of absolutely eating them up and that this was just a small hiccup.

Click for spoilers!

Avery ran away by herself and was hiding at Marion’s house, a nurse that worked with her dad at the same hospital. Marion and her were “friends,” but Marion had her own agenda when plotting Avery’s disappearance; she had a crush on William and wanted revenge since she found out about his and Nora’s affair. Marion was lying about seeing Avery get in Ryan’s car to further along her plan of eventually killing Avery and set him up for her disappearance as also a way of getting back to Nora because of the affair.

Avery realised Marion was going to kill her and pushed her down the basement stairs, effectively killing her. Avery gets home after being honed as a survivor and hero, but because she’s a narcissist, a glimpse of her not being entirely truthful about her disappearance started to shine through, and it is implied in the ending that the police started catching up onto her.