Never Lie

Never Lie is a thriller and maintains many of the common conceits of the genre. The narrative includes red herrings, or false clues, to lead the reader astray. For example, many details in the book suggest that Ethan and the mysterious EJ (named as Edward Jamison only in the final chapters) could be the same person. The author drops breadcrumbs to guide the reader to this incorrect assumption, such as noting that both Ethan and EJ like cabernet sauvignon from South Africa and including the detail that both men are good-looking but shorter than average. Such false clues are unveiled as the truth comes out, creating twists and turns that heighten the suspense. The heightened narrative suspense is mirrored by escalating pacing, especially in the final chapters, when surprise revelations—like the fact that Luke is living in Adrienne’s house—emerge to keep the reader turning the pages.

Never Lie is also suggestive of a “locked-room mystery,” although it does not fully meet the criteria of the genre. In a traditional locked-room mystery, a murder occurs under circumstances that make it seem impossible for a criminal to have entered the crime scene, killed the victim, and then left the crime scene again undetected. A famous example is Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: The characters are on a train, which gets stuck in the snow—so, when a person on the train is murdered, and there are no footprints in the snow going to or from the train, the conclusion is that one of the train’s passengers is the killer. Although Adrienne’s murder does not take place in a “locked room” like this one, the procedural elements of cracking the case do all take place within the confines of Adrienne’s house. Ethan and Tricia have no internet or phone access due to the snow and can only rely on the clues within Adrienne’s house—notably the tape recordings—to unveil the truth.

Mysteries are overwhelmingly read by women and commonly feature a threatened female protagonist in order to play into readers’ anxieties related to their gender (McGrath, Melanie. “Women’s Appetite for Explicit Crime Fiction Is No Mystery.” The Guardian, June 30, 2014). Throughout the novel, McFadden heightens tension for readers by not revealing the main character’s true identity or motivations, and it is only at the end of the novel that the reader realizes that the most powerful character in the book is the female that they felt such anxiety for at the beginning. By turning typical damsel-in-distress tropes on their head, the author uses a genre that caters to female audiences to enrich and empower their gender to include a wide array of virtue and vice, more accurately reflecting the actual human experience.