Lie to Me
by Ellison, J. T.






"Sutton and Ethan Montclair's idyllic life is not as it appears. They seem made for each other, but the truth is ugly. Consumed by professional and personal betrayals and financial woes, the two both love and hate each other. As tensions mount, Sutton disappears, leaving behind a note saying not to look for her"-Dust jacket flap.





Ethan Montclair, Hollywood handsome and blessed with a killer Brit accent, wrote literary novels until writer's block stalled him. He's married to Sutton, "a Botticelli angel, carved of ivory," who writes pop novels that haul in the money. Is Ethan jealous? Most likely, and that's just one of the hurts that surface when Ethan finds a note from his wife. She's gone. "Don't look for me." This overfilled, emotional, and immensely readable domestic thriller catalogs a marriage gone wrong. In lush prose divided into "then" and "now" chapters, we learn that Ethan may have killed the couple's child. A neighbor swears Ethan abused Sutton. He drank too much. They both did. Menacing phone calls and e-mails arrive after her disappearance, and a police computer whiz traces them back to Ethan. Police officer Holly Graham is the only one who senses something is wrong with the case the police are building, and her persistence exposes the Iago at the heart of the mystery. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.





The life of a picture-perfect literary couple sours when the wife goes missing and suspicion immediately falls on the husband, exposing a home life that was anything but picturesque.From the outside, Ethan and Sutton Montclair live the writerly dream in Franklin, Tennessee: he's a renowned literary novelist with a sexy English accent (it should be noted that accents do not make a character) while she's a more commercial writer. He's also got a wandering eye that's gotten him into trouble before. When Sutton vanishes one morning, leaving everything behind, along with a note telling Ethan not to look for her, Ethan can't decide if she took off on her own accord or if something more sinister happened. Since the husband is always guilty, the police seem convinced early on that Ethan is responsible given the number of domestic disturbance calls to the house and the stress caused by the recent loss of the couple's baby. Ellison (No One Knows, 2016, etc.) divides the novel roughly i n two, giving the first half of the narrative to Ethan, so by the time the reader gets to Sutton's version of events-many of which are so predictable as to read almost as parody-it's difficult to form an unbiased opinion of the characters or to know, or truly care, about their fates. The theme of "nothing is what it seems" is taken to expected extremes, with both the Montclairs carrying secrets which are meant to be sordid and harrowing but are instead somewhat banal in a thriller universe. Instead of a suspenseful peek into a crumbling marriage with a missing wife at the center, Ellison's latest devolves into a mishmash of well-worn tropes carried out by even more threadbare characters. Copyright Kirkus 2017 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.






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