FIRST LIE WINS (Hachette Headline 2024) is a propulsive, page-turning psychological thriller by Ashley Elston. The opening premise is simple but preposterous: you meet a stranger at a party who looks uncannily similar to you, and even shares your name; soon one of you will die, but which one?
Evie Porter is a nice American girl from the south with a loving boyfriend, a cosy home and a fancy group of friends. Or is she? Does Evie Porter really exist? The first bombshell is that this is a name given to her by her mysterious boss, Mr Smith. The second is that she is on a job and her mark is someone to whom she has become unfortunately too attached. From that curious beginning, the narrative progresses at a pacy and cliff-hanger speed, each chapter revealing a new suspect, victim or motivation, a new perspective on someone we thought we knew, or a whole different plot twist that wasn’t even on the radar.
Evie wants her life to be different. She can’t afford to make mistakes, especially if she wants to disappear and start again. But the stakes become higher when she realises that her boss has much more going on than she originally envisioned, and that he will do anything to make sure he wins.
And so Evie learns a valuable lesson: the first lie wins. Tell the first lie boldly and with confidence, laced with as much truth as possible, and it will inevitably become the dominant narrative.
Told in first person, with flashbacks in time, there is of course always the possibility that Evie is an unreliable narrator, but perhaps not? The written instructions from her reclusive boss appear to propel her days and her actions, but as the novel progresses, it seems that she has her own agenda and perhaps her own agency that is hidden from everyone, including the reader.
This is an impressively addictive psychological crime thriller that ticks all the boxes. Clever and twisty, reading this puzzle of a book is like slowly opening an origami swan to find out the order of the foldings.