The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager ****

The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager. Thirteen-year-old Emma Davis goes to Camp Nightingale and gets assigned to Dogwood Cabin with three 16-year-old girls. They vanish. The girls are not found, and the camp is shut down. Emma feels guilty, PTSD-guilty, rehab-guilty. When the camp reopens 15 years later, she ends up in Dogwood again with three different teenage girls. These girls also disappear, and she is the prime suspect. There are so many suspects that until the end, you can never be sure. A well-written and fast-moving mystery.

Camp Nightingale is on the shore of a man-made lake, Lake Midnight. It was created by a dam, and it inundated Pleasant Valley Asylum. The lake and surrounding forests, boulders, and caves are vividly described and can be considered another character. The descriptions of summer camp reminded me of my childhood.

I loved this book until the end. The resolution introduced too much new information for my taste and raised as many questions as it answered.

The camp belongs to the old-money White-Harris family. Franny is the matriarch. Her adopted sons are Theo (older than Emma) and Chet (younger than Emma). Mindy (Chet’s fiancée) only appears during Emma’s second summer. Lottie is Franny’s assistant and has been with the family forever. Ben Schumacher is the gardener and was hired just before Emma’s first summer.

Trivia: Riley Sager is the pen name of Todd Ritter. He chose a pen name because his earlier Todd Ritter novels didn’t sell, and he had to distance himself to get a fresh start in the publishing world. This is not uncommon. The same is true for Kate Elliott who began life as Alis A. Rasmussen.

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Spoilers:

The first three girls: Vivian murdered Natalie and Allison in revenge for them letting her sister Catherine drown. Natalie and Allison were best friends with Catherine when she died. Vivian drowned them in Lake Midnight by the submerged asylum before assuming a new identity.

The entire property is just 4,000 acres. I couldn’t believe that the submerged asylum wasn’t located after two exhaustive (volunteers, boats, helicopters) searches. Also, how was 16-year-old Vivian able to construct a new identity and maintain it for 15 years?

The second three girls: Chet, now 25, invited Emma Davis, now 28, to Camp Nightingale to punish her for her perceived transgressions against his old bother Theo 15 years ago. The punishment started with harassment and ended with framing her for the disappearance of Sasha, Krystal, and Miranda.

Red herrings:

Peaceful Valley Asylum sold the patients’ hair to keep the place open as a haven for these girls.

Ben Schumacher, the groundskeeper, had sex once with Vivian but was otherwise innocent. He was 19 and she was 16.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson **

 Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. Matriarch Audrey Cunningham had three sons (Ernest, Michael, Jeremy) with her first husband before the police shot him in a botched burglary. Michael later shot a police officer and was brilliantly defended by Marcelo Garcia (three-year sentence), who subsequently married Audrey. Audrey has organized a family reunion to mark Michael’s release. Michael attends with Erin, Ernest’s wife. Lucy, Michael’s ex-wife, also attends. That’s just some of the setup.

The author, through narrator Ernest, regularly interrupts the story to brag about how clever he is and how ingeniously the story is written. In my opinion, the story is overly complex, as indicated by the several long chapters required to unravel the mystery. I didn’t believe or care about the ultimate resolution.

Another indication of the complexity is when the author reviews the clues for the reader. “Here are the clues I used to put it together: Mary Westmacott; fifty-thousand dollars; my jaw; my hand; Sky Lodge’s snow cams; Sofia’s malpractice suit; a Brisbane PO box; Lucy cocking an imaginary gun against her head; a double-occupancy coffin; vomit; a speeding fine; a handbrake; a loupe; physiotherapy; an unsolved assault; a chivalrous and shivering husband; “the boss”; a jacket; footprints; Lucy’s nervous wait; a pyramid scheme; sore toes; my chalet’s phone; my dreams of choking; Michael’s newfound pacifism; and F-287: a dead pigeon with a medal for bravery.” This must be a record for the number of mystery clues.

The author regularly breaks into the narrative to make clever comments.

“So I’ll strive to do the opposite. Call me a reliable narrator. Everything I tell you will be the truth, or, at least, the truth as I knew it to be at the time that I thought I knew it. Hold me to that.”

“It’s pretty much the whole How-To-Write-A-Mystery checklist at this point. If it’s any consolation, no one’s phone runs out of battery until Chapter 33. So the reception and the battery thing is a cliché. I don’t know what to tell you—we’re in the mountains. What do you expect?”

“Crime novels always look at the motives of a list of suspects, but only from the perspective of the inspired inquirer. Am I really the detective just because it’s my voice you have to listen to? I guess this whole story would be different if someone else wrote it. Maybe I’m only the Watson after all.”

The mysteries included multiple murders over the previous thirty-five years, kidnappings, $267,000 in cash, missing evidence, and so many family secrets. Certainly another record for complexity.

While the author deserves credit for putting this all together (or was the plot constructed by an AI?), it is not a satisfying book to read.

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Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli ****

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. “Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.” Jeffrey Lionel Magee was an orphan at three and ran away from Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan at eleven. [Did I mention: Newberry Award Winner?]  He settled as the only white kid in the East End. “He couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.” He became a legend, but more importantly, he found a home. A fun and heart-warming read.

As the only white child in the East End, “Maniac loved almost everything about his new life. But everything did not love him back.” Despite his legendary feats, both athletic and otherwise, [He untied Cobble’s Knot], he was taunted, “Fishbelly go home.” He didn’t fare much better in the (white) West End. After living on both sides of the track, Maniac ultimately finds a place that accepts him as he is.

Like Matilda by Roald Dahl, Maniac Magee, features books and literacy. This book has the trifecta of pre-teen fantasies: racism, poverty, and literacy. Read it.

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