Beautiful Lies

This, along with its sequel Sliver of Truth, are thrillers by Lisa Unger.

Beautiful Lies is a halfway decent story, and I admit I got caught up in it while reading. However, I suspect if I hadn't I would have found a number of inconsistencies in the plot. Sliver of Truth I enjoyed considerably less. For one, the speaker spends a considerable amount of time addressing the reader directly. For two, the speaker offers up a lot of background information that is completely irrelevant to plot, characterization, or much of anything. And third, the author has an annoying tendency to jump around in the timeline of the story. I try to avoided anything that could possibly be construed as a spoiler in this blog, but since these things very much annoyed me, I am compelled to share what I consider to be a fairly harmless example. At the end of one chapter, we find the speaker finishing up an argument with her boyfriend in New York City. The start of the next chapter finds the speaker in Detroit, whereupon she provides a paragraph explaining why she is a bad driver, something completely irrelevant. A few paragraphs later, she writes to the reader (paraphrasing) "I bet you wonder how I got here." At this point, she begins to elaborate everything that happened between the end of the last chapter and the start of the current one, finally finishing up with where she currently is...again.

I suspect Beautiful Lies is a case of an amateur writer stumbling across a decent story in much the same way a chimpanzee, if put in front of a typewriter, will eventually quote Shakespeare. It is the sort of writing that is suitable for passing a few hours in an airport. However, I would not make a habit of reading books by this author.