Sweet Little Lies

Summary (from the publisher): Twenty-six-year-old Cat Kinsella overcame a troubled childhood to become a Detective Constable with the Metropolitan Police Force, but she's never been able to banish these ghosts. When she's called to the scene of a murder in Islington, not far from the pub her estranged father still runs, she discovers that Alice Lapaine, a young housewife who didn't get out much, has been found strangled.

Cat and her team immediately suspect Alice's husband, until Cat receives a mysterious phone call that links the victim to Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland eighteen years earlier. The call raises uneasy memories for Cat - her family met Maryanne while on holiday, right before she vanished. Though she was only a child, Cat knew that her charming but dissolute father wasn't telling the truth when he denied knowing anything about Maryanne or her disappearance. Did her father do something to the teenage girl all those years later? Could he have harmed Alice now? And how can you trust a liar, even if he might be telling the truth?

Determined to close the two cases, Cat rushes headlong into the investigation, crossing ethical lines and trampling professional codes. But in looking into the past, she might not like what she finds...

Review: I received an advance reader's edition of this novel from HarperCollins.

Cat Kinsella is a detective with the London police, whose childhood mistrust of her father becomes the forefront of her adult and professional life when a murder victim is linked to a missing teenage girl from Cat's past. Even as a child, Cat suspected her father knew something about the missing teenager and her father's dishonesty has haunted her for years. Now, she must work to uncover the truth once for and all, while balancing the ongoing work investigation to solve the murder case. In doing so, Cat crosses professional boundaries and risks both her job and her already tenuous relationship with her family.

There's a lot going on in this novel. In the initial chapters, much is made of Cat's lingering trauma over a finding a young girl at a murder scene, an event that caused her to have a breakdown and landed her in therapy. Although I assumed this much talked about incident would take a large role in the narrative, it seemed to only function as a way to show that Cat is somewhat unhinged and at a breaking point. Similarly, the murder victim, Alice Lapaine, who becomes the central investigation within the novel, has several abrupt turns, with important figures suddenly fading into the background and never seen again. There are also several points in the narrative when characters reveal that they were lying about long winded stories they told about their involvement, causing several about faces in the plot development.

Ultimately, I found the storyline convoluted and I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to buy the plot twists. Her fury over her father's suspected involvement years before seemed overblown and Cat's dishonesty on a professional level, where she continually withholds information that could have helped the investigation me question her integrity and believability. Furthermore, the tension in this novel was not as compelling as I would anticipate for a murder mystery.

Stars: 2