Book Review: The Lying Game by Sara Shepard.

Product details:
Publisher: Harper Teen.
Hardcover, 307 pages.
Release date: December 7th 2010.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Ages: 14+
Source: NetGalley

I had a life anyone would kill for. 

Then someone did.


The worst part of being dead is that there’s nothing left to live for. No more kisses. No more secrets. No more gossip. It’s enough to kill a girl all over again. But I’m about to get something no one else does—an encore performance, thanks to Emma, the long-lost twin sister I never even got to meet.

Now Emma’s desperate to know what happened to me. And the only way to figure it out is to be me—to slip into my old life and piece it all together. But can she laugh at inside jokes with my best friends? Convince my boyfriend she’s the girl he fell in love with? Pretend to be a happy, carefree daughter when she hugs my parents good night? And can she keep up the charade, even after she realizes my murderer is watching her every move?

From Sara Shepard, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Pretty Little Liars books, comes a riveting new series about secrets, lies, and killer consequences.

Let the lying game begin.

The Lying Game is the fun first installment in a new series from Pretty Little Liars author, Sara Shepard. I’m going to fess up and admit that this is my first introduction to Shepard’s writing. While I always loved the premise  of Pretty Little Liars, it’s just one of those series I never got around to reading and as time went on it passed me by. So, when I heard about this new series, I jumped straight in, and I’m glad I did. The Lying Game is as fun, flirty and frothy as it is dark and twisted. It’s Gossip Girl meets Mean Girls meets The Lovely Bones with a little bit of Desperate Housewives added in too. It will hugely appeal to it’s intended teen audience with characters you’ll just love to hate and a couple of hot love interests thrown in for good measure. With romance, intrigue and lots of suspense, this one has all the elements needed for a great new Young Adult series.

This book is already being adapted for TV, and since it’s very of it’s time and brimming with sassy pop-culture references, I think it will work really well. We follow the story of Emma Paxton with a voiceover effect (think Mary Alice from Desperate Housewives) from her long-lost and very dead twin, Sutton Mercer. Emma doesn’t know that Sutton is dead. In fact, she doesn’t know anything about her, but when she makes contact with her via Facebook (we’ve all been warned about the dangers of these social networking sites, right?!) she is suddenly catapulted into Sutton’s life and into a web of lies and deceit where she can’t trust anybody she meets and where she is definitely not safe. Emma soon finds out that Sutton lived a very privileged life, and one that was very different to her own foster-home upbringing, but due to her ultimate ‘mean girls’ status Sutton also made a lot of enemies. In life, Sutton had the kind of friends who secretly hated her, and who not so secretly wanted to get their hands on her boyfriend. She was a girl playing some very dangerous games, and they very badly backfired on her. Now that Emma has taken her place, and is trying ton find out what happened to her twin,  she could be next…

Shepard certainly knows how to spring a surprise! There were so many times during this book where I thought I had everything figured out, just to encounter another twist and another cliffhanger. There are major clues dropped throughout the book that were not picked up by Emma, and I just hope that these were deliberate on the part of the author, otherwise there are some major plot holes going on here, which would not be a good thing! The cast of characters in this book are not the kind of people you want to hang out with in real life - they are bitchy, vindictive and hurtful, but they make for some fun reading all the same. As for the boys, all-American boy Garrett might be right up your street, but I preferred dark and brooding Ethan (I love dark and brooding - it gets me every time). He’s an mysterious presence throughout the book, but I get the feeling he’s going to play a much bigger part in the second installment of this series, Never Have I Ever, publishing Summer 2011. This series is off to a great start, and I can’t wait to find out what happens next. It’s definitely a new guilty pleasure!