Synopsis:
Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin’s elite St. John’s College-and Ireland’s most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his four young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just nineteen, Will is locked away in the city’s Central Psychiatric Hospital.
Freshman Alison Smith moved to the Big Smoke to enroll in St. John’s and soon fell hard for Will Hurley. Her world bloomed … and then imploded when Liz, her best friend, became the latest victim of the Canal Killer-and the Canal Killer turned out to be the boy who’d been sleeping in her bed. Alison fled to the Netherlands and, in ten years, has never once looked back.
When a young woman’s body is found in the Grand Canal, Garda detectives visit Will to see if he can assist them in solving what looks like a copycat killing. Instead, Will tells them he has something new to confess-but there’s only one person he’s prepared to confess it to. The last thing Alison wants is to be pulled back into the past she’s worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, she returns to the city she hasn’t set foot in for more than a decade to face the man who murdered the woman she was supposed to become.
Only to discover that, until now, Will has left out the worst part of all …
via Goodreads
Review:
The Liar’s Girl by Catherine Ryan Howard is another one of the books that ended up on the backburner during my health issues lately. Yesterday, I picked it up with exactly half of it left and hungrily finished it. Needless to say, I truly enjoyed the book.
The main character, Alison Smith, is well-written. She has feelings and emotions like we all do, and they are portrayed in a manner that is realistic and believable. My heart ached with hers, and later on in the book I became genuinely worried for her. Unfortunately, she and her friend Liz are the only characters that felt that thorough–thus preventing me from giving this a five star rating.
As for the plot, it was consistent. There are several things that are given away early on in the book and because of that, I was worried about whether or not the book would hold my interest through until the end. Surprisingly, despite the amount that’s given away, Howard manages to continue to surprise the reader. Nothing went the way I expected it too and the twists and turns were refreshing.
The Liar’s Girl is a wonderful mystery book and definitely worth reading if whodunnits are your type of book. I’d like to thank Blackstone Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 💀💀💀💀
