Sweet Little Lies

A Novel

By: Caz Frear

Narrated by: Jane Collingwood

In this gripping debut procedural, a young London policewoman must probe dark secrets buried deep in her own family’s past to solve a murder and a long-ago disappearance.

Your father is a liar. But is he a killer?
Even liars tell the truth . . . sometimes.

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 she 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 ago? 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. . . .

Wonderful narration!

Really enjoyed this unique story made all the more enjoyable by superlative narration! Tiny sidebar of advice to the author: drop the use of “literally”, especially when you mean “metaphorically”!
Highly recommend this entertaining book.

Good narrator, story, level of tension

Engaging, thoughtful, focused with enough character development, conflicts, relationships
I liked the final plot twist

This is a first class procedural

I listened to this in two days. Great characters, intriguing mystery, good twists and turns, nicely written. Well worth a credit.

Great read!

This book is a very good mystery. It kept my attention the entire time I was on a trip. The narrator did a great job creating the characters and is a fabulous actress. I highly recommend it. I had no clue who caused the mystery and there was a great twist at the end.

For Her First Book.

She, Caz, had a unique style of writing that for the first few chapters would kinda lose me. Once I caught on to when the main character was thinking to herself from actually speaking the thought is when I really started enjoying the book. Perhaps I was a bit slow at picking up on this but, to me there were times when it was tricky to separate the thinking thought from the spoken thought. I feel like I'm not saying it in a way that drives my point home. However, I thought it was impressive how the author wrote about how the main character processed her thoughts between thinking, speaking, remembering, and actually doing.