Everything You Told Me by Lucy Dawson

Everything You Told Me by Lucy Dawson

Published: 5th January 2017

Publisher: Corvus

Pages: 336

Available in Paperback and on Kindle

Order now from Amazon

Rating: 4/5

Blurb

You went to bed at home, just like every other night.
You woke up in the back of a taxi, over 250 miles away.
You have no idea how you got there and no memory of the last ten hours.
You have no phone, no money; just a suicide note in your coat pocket, in your own writing.
You know you weren’t planning to kill yourself.
Your family and friends think you are lying.

Someone knows exactly what happened to you.
But they’re not telling…

Review

After reading Lucy Dawson’s You Sent Me a Letter last year I was expecting Everything You Told Me to have the same epic opening and it sure did. Sally finds herself 400 miles away from home on the edge of a cliff with a suicide note in her pocket and no idea how she got there. After the police return her home Sally and her family struggle to make sense of the previous evenings events and with everyone walking on eggshells, everything everyone says is over analysed. So will we ever work out whose telling the truth and who’s lying?

This is a book which can be read in two ways depending on how much you believe Sally’s story. You can believe Sally has no idea what happened and someone is out to get her or you can believe her family and believe she went off to commit suicide, either way you read it, it’s a fabulous twisty road to the end.

I tended to sympathise with Sally as she seemed exhausted and unhappy but not enough to try and kill herself. She’s struggling to cope with six month old Theo who will not sleep and four year old Chloe and keep the house in order with little help from husband Matthew, so it’s totally understandable that she’s almost at breaking point. If she’d has more support from husband Matthew and mother in law Caroline who lives close by things could have been very different.

This book has masses of different emotions floating round in it and as the tension slowly begins to build I was waiting for everything to boil over and explode. Just when I thought we’d reached that point Lucy Dawson throws in another twist so the intensity just deepens until the very end when we reach a truly shocking ending.

I did really enjoy reading this book but I found that there is a lot of repetition of events as Sally tries to make sense of things in her head and explain them to others and although necessary for the plot I did start to find this annoying.

I had a feeling which character was lying and I was right to an extent, but it wasn’t quite as simple as I thought it would be. I highly recommend you give this a go if you’ve enjoyed any of Lucy’s other books. I’ll also say the less you know beforehand about what actually happens the more you will enjoy the book.

Although I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as You Sent Me a Letter it’s still a great read and Lucy Dawson has a real talent for writing twisty intense psychological thrillers that will get stuck in your head days after you’ve finished them. I’m so looking forward to reading more from this author.

Thank you so much to the publishers Corvus for sending me this copy to review if I chose.