Book Review - First Lie Wins by Ashely Elston

Title: First Lie Wins
Author: Ashley Elston
Genre: Thriller/ Mystery
Published: 2024
 
Description: Evie Porter has everything a nice, Southern firl could want: a perfect, doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence and a garden, a fancy group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter does not exist.
 
The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and a location by her mysterious boss Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.  
 
Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job will be different. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s staring to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes. Especially after what happened last time.
 
Because the one thing’s she’s worked her entire life to keep clean, the one identity she couls always go back to, her real identity, just walked right into this town. Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher, but then, Evie has always liked a challenge.
 
Review: When I read the synopsis of this book, I had a completely different vision of the story. I believed it to be a domestic type of thriller, about a woman with a secret past, telling lie after lie to keep that life a secret. “First Lie Wins” gives you something completely different and it’s a lot more complicated and layered as you might expect.
 
What we get is a game of deception in which Evie has to try to be one step ahead at all times. Which she doesn’t always manage to do. I loved the fact that the characters constantly tried to outsmart each other.
 
The story is told from the point of view of Evie, a woman you don’t know much about at the start. Secrets start to unfold along the way and you realize she is not who she claims to be. We have several flashbacks throughout the story, that give you a lot of backstory about Evie and her past life. It was very thrilling.
 
One thing did bother me though. Evie is supposed to be the best, or at least one of the best, in her field of work. For someone of that level of expertise, Evie makes a lot of strange, dumb and bad decision and mistakes. I’m not saying she is bad at her job, she certainly isn’t. But I found it hard to believe she was one considered one of the best.  
 
Even though the book took me by surprise, by turning out to be really different from what I expected it to be, the story itself doesn’t have many big plot twists. It wasn’t predictable, but there were no moments in the book where I was left shocked about what was happening.
 
I think “First Lie Wins” is a solid thriller, I did enjoy it for the most part. But it’s one of those books I will probably have forgotten about reading at the end of the year.
 
Rating: 3/ 5