None of This is True by Lisa Jewell
Genre: Mystery & Thriller, Fiction, Suspense
Published: July 2023
Verdict: A solid 5 star unpredictable thriller!
About the Book:
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Thoughts:
Read if you like:
Unreliable characters
Multiple POVs
Short chapters with cliffhangers
Very dark & disturbing stories
Unpredictable plotline
Lisa Jewell is by far my favorite when it comes to captivating psychological thrillers with dark and disturbing stories that are too dangerous yet, when you realize it might be happening right now in some household, it just gives the creeps!
So when Alix Summers meets this strange woman Josie in a pub where she’s celebrating her 40th birthday, little does she know that her life is about to go all south and nothing will ever be the same again. Josie says she’s her birthday twin and Alix promptly invites a total stranger home to produce a brand new podcast featuring Josie’s life and the changes she’s about to undergo.
Out comes Josie’s version of her life with her controlling husband and two daughters and a teenage marriage which only sounds very sketchy. Alix is stuck between believing this woman but at some point she realizes that she’s actually scared of Josie and what she’s capable of.
At times, I wanted to slap Alix and urge her to open her damn eyes for once and speak her mind! This is a very strange and dark story and yes, people like this do exist in real world and it’s even more creepier to think of it that way. Lisa Jewell does it yet again with an unputdownable suspense thriller that would definitely keep you up all night and many nights after that.
Many thanks to the publisher for providing me an eARC to read/review. All thoughts are solely mine.
About the Author:
LISA JEWELL was born in London in 1968.
Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs and The Night She Disappeared.
Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over twenty-five languages. She lives in north London with her husband, two teenage daughters and the best dog in the world.
