A review by lawbooks600
Tell Me No Lies by Andrea Contos

2.0

Trigger warnings: Murder

5/10, this was such a confusing crime/thriller novel and I couldn't even understand what was going on half of the time. It was a really bad decision by the author to make the book have multiple POVs set one month apart from each other and the only thing telling them apart was Nora's POV being written in past tense and Sophie's POV being written in present tense making this book non-linear. The only other book I remember that was as confusing as this is Genuine Fraud and it was very confusing because the story went backwards in time except the beginning and the end (it was also a non-linear book) and I didn't enjoy that one. Another book that I read which was called It Should Have Been You was slightly better but only because it was linear, unlike this book.

Both of the main characters were flat and annoying, and I couldn't feel anything for them since Nora was a liar and she was disrespectful to some people but that might come from all the people who picked on her, Sophie was an attention-seeking ballet dancer, she even admitted it! Garrett was so frustrating to read because he was in the background half of the time and I didn't even know whether he was with Nora or Sophie or not. To be fair Garrett was a good antagonist considering that he was part of a cheating ring with a bunch of other people including Adam, Jude, and the principal and he probably killed anyone who tried to find out about it but why would he let someone access his computer so easily when Nora found out the password on a sticky note? There was a plot point about Maddie's death, Sophie initially thought Maddie killed herself but it was later revealed that Adam and Garrett killed her just to figuratively throw her away like trash.

Sophie was an unreliable narrator since she said Garrett disappeared then she said Garrett sent her some texts and is on a trip on the East Coast of America, which was kind of vague and confusing and even more so when I found out that Nora killed Garrett but Nora messaged Sophie to clear up the confusion in the end. The ending was just the people who were in the cheating ring facing some academic consequences, and that was it? If you like a mysterious action-packed novel try Cop and Robber by Tristan Bancks instead of this.