Tell Me No Lies – Lisa Hall – Blog Tour -Guest Post & Review

Published by Carina UK/HQ Stories

Ebook & Paperback : 20 October 2016

Don’t. Trust. Anyone.

It was supposed to be a fresh start.

A chance to forget the past and embrace the future.

But can you ever really start again?

Or does the past follow you wherever you go…

Steph and Mark have just moved house, trying to find a way forward after all the secrets, lies and betrayal.

But starting over isn’t always easy. Especially when someone will go to any lengths to make sure you never forget…

It’s a pleasure to be kicking off the blog tour for Tell Me No Lies, to be published this week.  Lisa Hall is an exciting new voice in the psychological thriller genre – to be able to write such suspenseful thrillers she must have a seriously twisted mind (and I mean that in the nicest possible way!!).  Her debut novel Between You and Me has already gathered over 1,160 5* reviews on Amazon since being published by Carina in March 2016 and I have no doubt that Tell Me No Lies will be another great success.   My review will follow at the end of this post but first I have a guest post from Lisa which I hope you enjoy.

Writing Psychological Thrillers

by Lisa Hall

I never set out to write a psychological thriller – not in the beginning. With my first book, I just wrote the story, and it wasn’t until my editor pegged it as a psychological suspense novel that I realised that was what it was. This time around though I knew exactly where I was going – and that was directly back into psych thriller territory. The idea for Tell Me No Lies came when someone in my life – someone who I was fairly close to – acted in a manner that was completely out of character, and showed some really unexpected behaviour. It made me think how well do we actually know the people that we let into our lives? Lots of us tend to take people at face value, and I wanted to explore what would happen if our instincts about somebody were wrong.

It’s a hard genre to write for – there are so many amazing psychological thriller writers out there, especially British writers. I’m a huge fan of C. L. Taylor, Julia Crouch and Elizabeth Haynes. There is a lot of pressure to come up with new, more exciting twists, but we are very lucky in that crime readers, and especially readers of psychological thrillers, are some of the most passionate readers I’ve ever come across. Bloggers and reviewers shout from the rooftops when they love a crime novel, and the support I’ve had from bloggers and reviewers has been fantastic. It’s an incredibly popular genre, and I believe the reason for that is the every day, domestic element that crops up all too frequently – it seems we find every day situations gone bad very scary, particularly when we realise that the things that happen in these novels…well, they could just happen to us too. I’d like to try my hand at writing something different one day, maybe a nice romance, or chick lit novel? I couldn’t guarantee that everyone would survive though…

My Review:

After reading this book I can guarantee that you will Never.Trust.Anyone.Ever.Again. When newly pregnant Steph and her husband Mark move to a new town with their young son Henry it is supposed to be a fresh start for them both. Times have been tough, for various reasons (which are revealed) but someone is determined to make Steph scared and uncomfortable. Mark has to travel a lot for his work and so Steph and Henry are left alone and vulnerable – just to add to the suspense.

The characterisations in the story are excellent – even some of the peripheral characters will have you grinding your teeth.   Steph is portrayed as someone quite fragile mentally but who is trying her best to be strong and overcome past issues and this is where I had a lot of sympathy for her. She has trust issues which means that she doesn’t make friends easily and so when Laurence, her charming and good looking next door neighbour and Lila, a young woman from across the road attempt to befriend her, she tentatively accepts. However it becomes clear that someone is trying to intimidate and scare her, the question is who? There appear to be many suspects, some from her past as well as her present. Is she just being paranoid? Is someone really targeting her – or is she the book world’s best unreliable narrator?  You can make up your own mind.

I have to admit that there were times when out of sheer frustration, I wanted to shake Steph and shout at her to bring her to her senses.  She seemed incapable of joining the dots together and making a picture. I could see it – why wouldn’t she!

This book will truly mess with your head. I think I probably suspected almost everybody in turn before making my mind up and even then I had some doubts.  The story rolls along at a pace and it was certainly an addictive book that I wanted to keep going back to.  Tell Me No Lies is one seriously twisty thriller that shows how difficult it can be to leave the past behind…and that ending.  I didn’t see that coming!

My thanks to the publisher for the paperback copy to review and for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.

About the author:

Lisa loves words, reading and everything there is to love about books. She has dreamed of being a writer since she was a little girl – either that or a librarian – and after years of talking about it, was finally brave enough to put pen to paper (and let people actually read it). Lisa lives in a small village in Kent, surrounded by her towering TBR pile, a rather large brood of children, dogs, chickens and ponies and her long-suffering husband. She is also rather partial to eating cheese and drinking wine.
Readers can follow Lisa on Twitter @LisaHallAuthor

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