The Lying Game by Ruth Ware, book review: Gripping enough to be devoured in a single sitting

The crime writer's third book about four old schoolfriends with a terrible secret might be long, but you won't be able to put it down

Thank goodness for Ruth Ware, a contemporary crime writer who’s successfully extracted the integral elements of the genre’s classics – she’s been compared to Agatha Christie, and understandably so – and repackaged them for the modern reader.

Her last book, The Woman in Cabin 10, was a clever cruise ship-set take on The Lady Vanishes, while her debut In a Dark, Dark Wood examined the shifting sands of female friendship when a hen party took a turn towards murder.

She returns to similar territory here in her third novel, The Lying Game, the premise of which is simple but highly effective: four old schoolfriends bound together by a terrible secret.

Fifteen years ago, Isa Wilde arrived at Salten House, a boarding school on the south coast. She and three other girls, Fatima, Kate and Thea, form an inseparable clique impervious to the world around them. They spend their weekends at Kate’s home, the Old Mill, a ramshackle building overlooking the nearby estuary, under the libertarian eye of her father Ambrose (the school’s art teacher), and in the company of Kate’s sort-of half-brother Luc.

Most of the girls’ time, however, is spent playing the Lying Game, competing with each other to get away with increasingly outrageous untruths: to “outwit everyone else – ‘us’ against ‘them’”. Then one day something terrible happens, and henceforth they’re “lying not for fun, but to survive”.

When we meet Isa at the beginning of the novel she’s a 32-year-old lawyer and new mother living in London. Woken by an unexpected text message from Kate in the middle of the night – “I need you” is all it says – she hurries down to Salten, where her friend still lives – now all alone in the crumbling Old Mill – followed shortly thereafter by Fatima and Thea. Human bones have been discovered buried on the beach, and the women need to get their stories straight.

Ware weaves a nicely knotty, and more importantly, plausible mystery that as well as delivering the expected twists, turns and tension readers will be looking for, also showcases the thorny tensions and loyalties at work in the friendships between her main characters – “their pasts so woven with mine,” Isa thinks, “that there’s no way to separate us, any of us” – and although it’s Isa who provides the central consciousness of the novel, each of the four anti-heroines is fully realised in her own right.

It’s also enormously pleasing that The Lying Game doesn’t hinge on either the persecution or subjugation of its female characters; instead it’s their agency that propels the narrative forward (something that shouldn’t be as refreshing as it still is in this day and age). Ware also shies away from unnecessary melodrama, her characters aren’t blindsided by unforeseen external factors, but rather the shortsighted tunnel vision of their own egocentric youth, “arrogant and unthinking.”

My only complaint is that at just under 400 pages it’s slightly too long, but that can be forgiven in a book that’s gripping enough to be devoured in a single sitting.

'The Lying Game' by Ruth Ware is published by Harvill Secker, £12.99