Everyone Here Is Lying

Everyone Here Is Lying by Shari Lapena is a standalone thriller published in July 2023, her seventh novel and an instant New York Times, Sunday Times, and number-one Canadian bestseller. It's widely considered among the strongest in her catalogue - fast, tightly wound, and building to a finale that has genuinely surprised readers who considered themselves Lapena veterans.

William Wooler is, on paper, exactly the kind of man Stanhope is full of: respected, professional, devoted family man. In reality he's been sleeping with his neighbour Nora for months, and on the afternoon the book opens, she's ended it at their usual motel. William comes home devastated and short-tempered, finds his nine-year-old daughter Avery unexpectedly back from school, loses his temper, and then leaves. Hours later, Avery's family reports her missing. William, who kept quiet about having been in the house that afternoon for reasons that will become obvious, is now the prime suspect in whatever happened to his daughter - and Stanhope, which has never had reason to lock its doors, suddenly has everyone on the street watching everyone else.

The Small Town with Dark Underbelly mechanics Lapena employs here are some of the sharpest in her catalogue. Every resident of Connaught Street has something to hide, and the Multiple POV structure - moving through William, his wife Erin, the neighbours, the detectives, and several others with apparently peripheral connections to Avery - keeps revealing new reasons why none of the accounts the police are receiving can be trusted. The Deception operating across the street isn't concentrated in one marriage or one affair; it's distributed, ordinary, and individually quite understandable, which is precisely what makes the collective Dark Secrets so difficult to untangle.

Lapena sets the entire novel across four days, which gives the investigation real urgency - a missing child's window is short, and the pressure on both the detectives and the neighbourhood's various secret-keepers to do something before that window closes drives the pacing with unusual tightness. Short chapters and a constantly rotating cast of evasive narrators keep the pages turning, and the Mystery and Secrets Revealed arrives in a consistent stream rather than a single late-book avalanche, which keeps the reading experience propulsive throughout rather than slow in the middle.

The Twist Ending here is one of the most discussed in Lapena's catalogue, with readers fairly evenly split between those who found it the most satisfying finale she's written and those who felt the reveal asked for a character consistency that wasn't quite there in the build-up. The majority view, though, is that this is among her sharpest and most purely enjoyable books - tighter than Someone We Know, more surprising than The End of Her, and by several accounts the entry point most likely to turn a new reader into a Lapena completist.