I usually love Nicci French’s books and eagerly started this one. I enjoyed the first part as it’s well written and sets the scene and characters vividly. However the plot gets very contrived and the characters become caricatures. The ending was totally unbelievable and very disappointing.

Love Nicki Frenchs books so was expecting great things! Safe to say I got them!

Very intriguing book from start to finish, and a good plot with a great ending of which you defo will not expect, I didn’t anyway far from it, it was a bit of a shocker!

Patiently awaiting her next one

Looked forward to reading this but it was very disappointing and more like a household manual than the thriller it purported to be. The percentage read just limped along and I have to confess to doing an awful lot of skimming simply to get to the finishing line. Neither could I take any of the characters seriously either! Not nearly as gripping as previous books, sad to say - a huge letdown.

What a great read! I haven’t read a book by this author for a while but this one has got me back into them.
Loved it.

Neve goes to visit her lover only to find him dead but instead of calling the Police, she cleans up any sign of her presence and leaves. His body is soon discovered and Neve is going to have to lie to keep her affair a secret. The question is just how far will she go when she realizes her daughter may know more than she thinks.

This was an interesting thriller. The basic plot was simple to follow and I never guessed the truth but it didn't thrill me as much as I thought. Although I understood Neve's needs to lie, I hoped she would eventually come clean. The story was good but the ending was a bit too tame for me. I wanted a bigger showdown. It's a slow build with a quick hint of action to end the story.

Neve is a wife and mother. She’s a dependable person, a good friend. She’s also having an affair. When she goes to her lover's apartment one morning, she finds him dead on the floor. He has been murdered. But she doesn’t want anyone to know about the affair. So she doesn’t call the police. Instead, she goes around the apartment removing any sign that she has been there. But she can’t get rid of everything. She can’t find his phone, and there are messages between them. So when the police begin their investigation, it’s just the start of Neve’s problems. And her lies.

This is a gripping read. It’s very well written because Neve is constantly on the run and constantly covering up for herself, scared and has no idea what will happen next. So neither do you. And although Neve is basically a liar and adulterer, you feel bad for her and you’re on her side. You don’t want her to get caught. So you’re really with her through all the twists and turns, and there are lots of them. Especially because Neve has no idea what she’s doing. She’s just fumbling through in desperation, which makes it more exciting as she could literally quite easily get caught at any moment.

I would recommend this book because the characters are good, it’s well written, gripping and you really want to know what will happen and whether Neve will get away with what she’s done. And also, who actually committed the murder, which seems like a secondary concern but of course it isn’t!

The book begins in an innocuous manner, the scene is set in an average household which is starting their day. There seems to be some underlying tension but all is revealed very shortly.

We plunge headlong into the chaos that is now Neve Connelly's life. She is an ordinary woman who has made few mistakes in her life but one of the biggest is now going to drive her mad (almost). The setup is interesting, as are the possibilities but I found the narrative choppy and was not convinced with the final conclusion. The conclusion that I was not satisfied with was of two parts, how/where Neve ends up and the person who committed the crime. The first part I could live with but the second was hard to digest because it seemed very disconnected. 

The people are not nice, none of the characters introduced to us is even remotely the kind of person that one would actively seek to befriend (if they knew all we did about most of them) and it was physically exhausting to read about the pace of their lives after the murder has been made public. I do not want to reveal the specifics because that does form a chunk of the narrative. That being said, the bond between friends was very realistic, considering the fact that they are past middle-aged and their relationships have survived the time since college and Idealistic/utopian dreams.

I would recommend this to readers of this genre. I did not dislike the book, but it was not really for me. 

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

I'm not sure why but this book was really difficult for me to get in to . I can't put my finger on the reason for this and I really don't think that it's anything to do with the book which had me honestly furrowing my brow as I tried to work out what was happening.

This is honestly a really good psychological novel. I liked the way that all of the characters were all quite believable .

Sorry, I will not write a review. I gave up about 80 pages in because I just could not get into it. I could not enjoy the characters.

Thanks to Net Galley and Simon Schuster UK for an ARC of this book in exchange for a review.
One lie leads to another lie followed by yet more lies. Neve is popular among her friends, married to Fletcher and they have 3 children.
Neve works in a publishing firm which she and her university friends helped establish. Fletcher works from home, is depressed, they are in a bit of a rut, have had a difficult couple of years with their eldest daughter Mabel.
Neve has been having an affair with her boss Saul, who is also married, she receives an uexpected text from him, cycles to his flat only to find him dead in a pool of blood and a hammer lying beside him,
Neve makes the decision to remove all traces of herself from the flat, she frantically goes from room to room, removing not only traces of herself but also the murderer, she leaves the flat spotless and takes with her a bag of evidence.
DCI Hitching knows the scene of the crime has been tampered with, but by whom, everyone is under suspicion. Neve lies to her husband, her friends and DCI Hitching. She begins to play detective herself, she has a list of suspects which include her husband, friends and her daughter Mabel. She is drowning in a web of lies and deceit Lots of twists to this story with an element of suspense.

The Lying Room is a great concept for me – a woman finds her lover murdered in his flat and helps to cover it up to hide the evidence of her affair. In all ways it should have really gripped me and I should have really struggled to put it down however I did feel that it fell down in some key aspects.

Firstly, the read felt a bit like a slog at times – there was so many bits of unnecessary detail packed in about meal times and nights out and the school run that I honestly didn’t care about and did nothing to further the plot. It even got to the point where I thought the hamster and its cage might have had something to do with the murder as it was described so many times throughout the story. The character of Mabel (Neve’s teenage daughter) also really annoyed me and I don’t understand why she was given the free rein that she was to be such a horrible individual! To be honest I had zero compassion for all the characters really – I didn’t even really like Neve. I also found the story to be a little unrealistic in certain places – surely CCTV or witnesses would have placed Neve near the flat at the time of the murder or even just all of the other times that she visited the flat to have an affair? Also covering up all trace evidence of you at a murder scene when it’s somewhere you have spent a lot of time is surely a lot more difficult than just a bit of bleach and a wash cycle! The end reveal also felt very unrealistic and I didn’t understand the motivation that the perpetrator had to commit the murder in the first place.

Overall The Lying Room was a great concept but on the whole fell very flat for me. Thank you to NetGalley & Simon & Schuster UK for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I started reading this book and unfortunately after getting a short way in I was unable to continue with this book. What happened early on the book seems crazy to me and I do not understand why anyone would act in this matter just to protect their appearance of a good life. I’m sure the story is good, it just wasn’t for me and I couldn’t carry on.

While The Lying Room is not my favourite Nicki French book, I was nevertheless hooked from the start. It is a slightly far fetched narrative but the main character Neve is a believable working mother with her various difficult family members; the artistic working from home husband, the possibly anorexic daughter and her two boys who actually seem just like two boys should!

I enjoyed guessing how she would solve her problems and was satisfied with the outcome. I’d recommend it.

I was completely gripped by this intriguing standalone thriller by the brilliant authors who write as Nicci French. It’s a fairly basic premise to start with – Neve has been having an affair with someone she works with, and she heads over to his flat to find him lying on the floor, brutally murdered.

I won’t say anything more about the plot but the boom manages to really convey Neve’s despair and how she becomes dangerously embroiled in the crime scene and investigation, to the point where she can’t see a way out without either going to prison or destroying her family and very fragile daughter.

I absolutely loved everything about this book. The characters are convincing and, despite Neve’s faults, she is still really likable – I was rooting for her throughout and it made me only more invested in the story. The authors effectively conveyed how someone could feel so desperate and trapped, and we witness Neve’s desperation grow. as the plot builds. The ending also left me satisfied – I was worried it would be completely unbelievable but it felt like a fitting end.

With brilliant writing and a great plot, this is definitely a novel I’d recommend!

When I first started reading this book, I struggled to get into it initially. I thought that the characters were slightly harder to relate to, but as I read on the plot became easier to understand and some of the characters became more believable.

I could relate to Neve as a mother - and how overprotective of her daughter she was. I found Fletcher to be a bit of a 'wet lettuce' -I just found him slightly annoying. I wanted to understand more about Mabel - I found her really interesting but didn't feel that I knew enough about her backstory to really understand her character.

I thought that some parts of the story were slightly unbelievable but overall had a good storyline!

It has been a million years since I last read a Nicci French book and after reading The Lying Room I am kicking myself because this is such a brilliant, twisty crime read. For those not in the know, Nicci French is the psuedonym of husband and wife Nicci Gerrard and Sean French who write clever psychological thrillers together. They’ve written a number of stand alone books and have also co-authored the wildly successful Frieda Klein novels too.

In The Lying Room our protagonist is Neve, wife, mother, friend and mistress. Her lover is Saul, one of the bosses of the company who has recently taken over the small publishing company she and three friends set up after leaving University. Neve has two children, one of whom, Mabel is a troubled and fragile young woma who takes up much of Neve’s mental space and energy. Saul is a distraction from the day to day difficulties of her life. They meet in his apartment in London and have illicit sex whilst her husband is working and his wife is ensconsed in the family home outside the capital. One day Saul texts Neve and asks her to come to his flat, but when she gets there she discovers him bludgeoned to death in his bed with a hammer.

Her immediate response is not to call the police as this would bring her whole world down around her. She decides instead to clean the apartment from top to bottom. She removes any trace that she was ever there, throwing away her toothbrush, washing the glassware and bleaching the place thoroughly. She returns home and waits for his body to be discovered but that night she wakes in a panic – she’s left something behind and she must retrieve it. So she returns, except it isn’t there. And neither is the hammer. Somebody knows her secret.

And so we’re off, diving head first into a cat and mouse game where Neve tries to stay one step ahead of whoever it is that killed Saul and knows about their affair. Neve is a brilliantly compelling character who leaps fully formed from the page. She is like a swan – on the surface serene keeping a family and business running but in reality she is scrambling to keep everything together. Tension is ramped up as the police investigate and the finely tuned pieces of her life start to wobble. She lies to her husband, she lies to her husband, she lies to the police and each lie pulls the web tighter and tighter around her.

This is such a fun read – I was convinced I had worked everything out very early on and was very, very smug about it and was delighted to discover I was completely wrong. It is excellently plotted with themes like infidelity, depression, drug addiction and a stale marriage running through the narrative. It is a fraught read; I could feel how high the stakes were as Neve tried to misdirect the police to avoid a jail term. It is a complete page turner of a book and got 5 stars from me.

I’m exhausted- I feel like I have read this thrilling book whilst holding my breath. A great concept, brilliantly written and thoroughly recommended. Do read this excellent, tense thriller.

A bit of an infuriating read this book was. On one hand I really enjoyed reading it because for about 90% of the book you hadn't a clue what was going on/who was responsible but why I am marking it lower is that I didn't think the ending was that good, it felt more a let down.

The Lying Room is a fast page turning psychological thriller. Set in a familiar domestic world, sympathetic but flawed characters and a dark undercurrent of menace. I am a huge fan of the author(s) and this novel does not disappoint.

Must be a nightmare to be someone like Neve, with so many people hanging around your house all the time. Ugh.

Moral of the story: Nothing good can come of a dinner party - especially not if you're the one hosting it.