Book Review: FIRST LIE WINS by Ashley Elston

 

Title: FIRST LIE WINS

Author:  Ashley Elston

Read: March 2024

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 all the stars!

 

Book Description:

 

Evie Porter has everything a nice, Southern girl 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 doesn’t exist.

My musings:

 

What a fun read this book turned out to be! Twisty, original and well plotted, it really stood out from other thrillers I have read this year. 

Evie Porter (not her real name) is a con artist (or perhaps a spy or secret assassin, we don’t really know at this point), employed by her mysterious boss, Mr Smith, who she has never laid eyes on. He only communicates with her through middle-men, endowing her with a new identity, location and job description. Evie has just been assigned a new mark: Ryan Summers, head of a large trucking company. But this job feels different in many ways. Not only because Evie actually LIKES Ryan and doesn’t want to screw him over, but she also has suspicions about the motives of her boss. Is this a genuine job or a test? Is she in danger? This is as much as I am going to say, because it’s best to go into this story blind to get the most out of its insane twists and turns and appreciate just how cleverly it has been plotted from the start.

 

I loved Evie as a protagonist. She is clever, resilient and plucky, which makes for an exciting, fast-paced read as she pitches her own mind against that of her mysterious and very dangerous boss. 

 

If I had thought at the beginning of the book that this story might follow a well-trodden path, then I was soon very pleasantly surprised that there was absolutely nothing predictable about Evie and the decisions she made. In a time when thrillers are flooding the market, it’s very hard to find a true original gem, but FIRST LIE WINS definitely fits into that category. I got so invested in the story that I was sad when it ended, even though the finale was most satisfying.

 

If you are tired of predictable thrillers, then this one is definitely for you!