Chris High
Sabine Durrant‘s third psychological thriller starts with a lie. The kind we ‘ve all told: to a former acquaintance we can‘t quite place but still, for some reason, feel the need to impress. The next thing you know, you ‘re having dinner at their house, and accepting an invitation to join them on holiday… swept up in their perfect life…which turns out to be less than perfect. In Lie With Me, Paul, who once wrote a bestselling novel, has had his latest book rejected when he bumps into an old university friend. Paul paints a charming, if not entirely accurate, version of his life, and ends up being invited on holiday with his former acquaintance. But nothing is quite what it seems on the surface.
Strikingly, none of the characters is particularly likeable, something Sabine worked hard to develop. ‘It‘s hard to say too much without giving the plot away, ‘ she said, ‘but in a psychological thriller, it‘s fundamental that the reader is engaged in working out who is to be liked and who is to be trusted. For me part of the challenge is to confuse the boundaries between the two. Just because someone is charming on the surface doesn‘t necessarily mean they don‘t have sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies. In Lie With Me I wanted the reader to get to know certain characters better as the novel progresses and to change their opinion of them as they do so, because that‘s what happens in life. ‘