Can you tell the truth from the lies?

Sadie loves her daughter and will do anything to keep her safe.

She can’t tell her why they had to leave home so quickly – or why Robin’s father won’t be coming with them to London.

She can’t tell her why she hates being back in her dead mother’s house, with its ivy-covered walls and its poisonous memories.

And she can’t tell her the truth about the school Robin’s set to start at – a school that doesn’t welcome newcomers.
Sadie just wants to get their lives back on track.

But even the lies with the best intentions can have deadly consequences…

My thanks to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for the opportunity to join the blog tour. I received a copy of The Lies You Told from the publisher.

I read crime and horror fiction. I don’t bat an eye at murder scenes, ghostly or monsterous carnage or even at depictions of evil crimes and wrong doings.  I know it isn’t real.  But I find reading about bullying to be hugely uncomfortable.  I get annoyed, anxious and so very frustrated when I read about bullies. So Kudos to Harriet Tyce for dropping a big bundle of angst into my hands with her excellent depictions of loathsome bullies in The Lies You Told. It all seemed so believable that I experienced maximum bully-hating fury at some chapters.

In The Lies You Told we meet Sadie.  She and her daughter (Robin) have left America for reasons we don’t immediately know, they have left Sadie’s husband and they are in Sadie’s mum’s old house. A house she hated as a child and it is clear she had no fondness for her late mother either.   Robin is to be enrolled at Sadie’s old school which is somewhere Sadie also doesn’t seem to hold too many fond memories of. The reader knows Sadie is putting herself into a situation she is far from happy about but we don’t immediately get to know why Sadie is seeking this fresh start.

The early stages of the book follow Sadie and Robin trying to adjust to their new lifestyle.  Neither find it easy.  We see their engagements around the school and it left me with questions I needed to have answers to.  Why is Robin forced to endure the misery of not being one of The Group?  Why are the PTA mums so abhorrant and mean to Sadie?  Though I did feel Sadie seemed to have a knack of saying the wrong thing around them…a nervousness of being picked on by the group?  These questions kept me reading, I needed to understand what was happening and I was desperate for their respective upset to be resolved.

Away from school Sadie has other issues to contend with.  Before leaving for America to have Robin – a decade before the events in The Lies You Told – she was a well regarded lawyer.  On her return to the UK Sadie is given the opportunity to work on a high profile case, a teacher accused of grooming one of his pupils. The case should never have been brought Sadie is told by her colleagues.  Harriet Tyce worked as a criminal barrister for a number of years and she draws upon that wealth of experience ensuring the the courtroom scenes in this book make for compelling reading.

For the reader we get the courtroom drama, Sadie and Robin’s domestic dramas and the overarching mystery around why the pair left the US to find themselves in this strained and unusual position.  More than enough intrigue to keep the pages turning and certainly some fabulously realised characters to keep me emotionally engaged with Sadie’s plight.  Blood Orange was a real high point in my 2019 reading, Harriet Tyce has another good ‘un on her hands with The Lies You Told.

The Lies You Told is published by Wildfire and is available in Hardback, audiobook and digital format.  You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07WWSCGVS/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1