
Author: Sophie Stava
Published by: Scout Press on Mar. 4, 2025
Genres: Mystery/Thriller
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Source: Simon & Schuster Canada
Book Rating: 8.5/10
A read-in-one-night suspense thriller narrated by a compulsive liar whose little white lies allow her to enter into the life and comfort of a wealthy married couple who are harboring much darker secrets themselves. For the millions of us still chasing those gone girls, this is perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Lucy Foley, and Laura Dave.
Sloane Caraway is a liar.
Harmless lies, mostly, to make her self-proclaimed sad, little life a bit more interesting.
So when Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she can’t help herself—she tells the girl’s (very attractive) dad she’s a nurse and helps him pull a bee stinger from the girl’s foot.
With this lie, and chance encounter, Sloane becomes the nanny for the wealthy, and privileged Jay and Violet Lockhart. The perfect New York couple, with a brownstone, a daughter in private school, and summers on Block Island.
But maybe Sloane isn’t the only one lying, and all that’s picture-perfect harbors a much more dangerous truth. To say anything more is to spoil the most exciting, twisty, and bitingly smart suspense novel to come out in years.
The thing about lies is that they add up, form their own truth and a twisted prison of a world. And in Count My Lies, Sophie Stava spins a breakneck, unputdownable thriller about the secrets we keep, and the terrifying dangers that lurk just under the images we spend so much time trying to maintain.
Careful what you lie for.
Review:
Intricate, ominous, and riveting!
Count My Lies is a highly suspenseful, character-driven thriller that takes you into the life of Sloane Caraway, a young woman whose obsessive compulsion to lie, snoop, and emulate may finally have caught up with her when she ingratiates herself with the wealthy Lockhart’s, who seem to have a lot of devastating, destructive, damaging secrets of their own.
The writing is tight and intense. The characters are complex, secretive, and troubled. And the plot is a devious, sinister tale full of twists, turns, lies, deception, manipulation, suspicions, revelations, mayhem, obsession, violence, and familial drama.
Overall, Count My Lies is a clever, tortuous, unnerving tale by Stava that kept me guessing from the very first page and was deliciously surprising, relentless and absolutely bursting with misdirection.
This novel is available in paperback now.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.