Gytha Lodge's new novel waivers backwards and forwards between psychological thriller and police procedural. From the first page it is addictive with many twists, turns and revelations.
Louise, having woken up next to a bloody corpse in her bed, writes a tense and intense narrative to her husband. It explores the darkside of her own psyche as it reveals the failings of their relationship.
The well-drawn characters make it particularly gripping and the way the author cleverly conceals the whodunit element keeps one turning the pages at a furious pace.

If you like police procedural novels then this is for you. A complicated story with many plot lines that twist and turn constantly. Although I enjoyed this bock I was a little unhappy as with the female suspects being drunk and hung over.
Although the third book in a series it works as a stand alone novel.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Michael Joseph UK

Premise sounded good and there were lots of good bits for sure. Sadly I have read too many books where characters get away with everything or plots become very unbelievable due to alcohol fuelled storylines. A shame as without that, this would have been a unique and interesting novel.

This was a really good read with lots of twists and turns. I spent my time trying to work out what had happened and who the murderer was. I didn’t get it right at all. I liked being able to read all the sides of the story and trying to work out the series of events that had led to Louise waking up beside a dead man.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy.

This is a tricky book to review. I’m rating this book 2.5 stars.

This book had me hooked from the first chapter. Such a great set-up for a crime fiction novel. Who is the dead guy? Why can’t Louise remember anything? Who is Louise?

The bit that annoyed me most was the editing/delivery of the story. It’s like the author was as confused as the main character. It was half trying to be ‘Gone Girl’ with diary style insight to the real Louise and half trying to focus on the detective team and their personal lives. If it had had better editing this book would’ve been excellent.

Instead, as intriguing as all these parts were they clouded the main plot and as such their detective work seemed a bit slow. Important paths of discovery were put on hold or not chased until the last minute and rather than immediately sending phones and computers off for analysis the team did it themselves first.

Even the ending seemed to go on for ages.... Overall a little disappointed with this one.

Thanks to NetGalley for my advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

I wasn't very keen on all the drunkeness, I hate women making themselves vulnerable but the police investigation part was excellent. Lots of ups and downs and red herrings, good descriptions and a fast moving story. Great conclusion.

Clever, intense and chilling this is a skin crawling thriller that will give you goosebumps. I love the detective in this, hoping there will be further books with her in.

I loved the last book by this author so was looking forward to this one.
It started extremely well.
I absolutely loved the idea of Louise writing her feelings down to her husband in a letter and her separating her own two different personas really worked.
It's a great stand alone thriller which I read in a couple of days.
I did feel it was a little long though and the ending wasn't great. Sorry.

Lie Beside Me by Gytha Lodge is a very complicated and complex novel, with many twists and turns. Louise wakes up after a night out with her girlfriend April and finds herself in bed with a dead man , who she doesn’t know and has no idea what has happened. Louise then thinks it’s a good idea to drag the man out of her bed and leave him outside in the snow with the mystery knife she finds beside him.
The police investigation team then have to try to unravel the murder and find out who is responsible for the man’s death. The team is the same as have been in Gytha Lodge’s other books, which I have also read and enjoyed. There are many threads to the storyline and there are many suspects who may be responsible for Alex’s death. Louise is an obvious suspect, then her husband Niall is also suspected of being involved and then there was Issa, Alex’s husband and even Louise’s friend April is a suspect.
Whilst I enjoyed reading this book, I think it become over complicated and there were too many threads to follow to make the story believable.
However that is only my opinion and I expect other readers will disagree.

I really enjoyed this crime thriller and so want to thank Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and reviewing it. When Louise wakes up hung over (as usual) she finds a man dead lying beside. Her memory completely blank she cannot recall how he got there. The young man ( later identified as Issa) was stabbed, with an unusual knife. I loved the police narrative and the sub-plot going on. This is my first novel by this author but I would definitely read another. Plenty of twists to keep you guessing.

An exciting crime procedural focusing on a suspect that cannot remember what had transpired before she woke up next to a dead body. Engrossing and mysterious, I loved this book!

I enjoyed this book so much! The characters were so cleverly described; I really felt I got to understand them, the loyalty shown to Hanson by her colleagues felt so real. This was so well-plotted it kept me guessing and I enjoyed that feeling. The characters were complex and there was so much going on, I wanted to keep up with it all and be able to work out what happened but more kept being woven into the web.
Such a good book!

This totally screws with your mind - I mean main character Louise isn't even sure whether she did it or not. Although I wouldn't even say it's twisty and turny, more a cleverly plotted story line which just adds layer upon layer right up until the end. The u-turn is more on the characters than the plot, with the author turning you from hating someone (Louise) to rooting for them and vice versa with other characters (Alex). I also liked that while this was full of unexpected revelations, it remained realistic unlike so many books which push the boundaries too far in their attempt to deliver shock after shock. Its part police procedural and part psychological thriller alternating between the two.

I really really enjoyed this but couldn't give it the full five-stars for a couple of reasons. One I always find crimes of a sexual nature uncomfortable reading. I also dislike it in crime novels when the detectives' stories follows that of the victim - it just feels too much and unnecessary. This is the first/only one I've read but is actually the third in a series. It works as a standalone although at the start I did find all the different police detectives difficult to keep track of as it was obviously the first time I'd met them - it was perhaps also why I wasn't quite as invested in their stories too. I'll definitely be catching up with the previous two books though.

Lie Beside Me was very much a detective mystery, rather than a standard thriller. I really enjoyed the relationships and the drama amongst the police/detectives. They were fully fleshed out characters with their own storylines. These storylines felt at the forefront of the book to me, with the mystery and Louise’s point of view interspersed between. This built a little tension when Louise revealed something shocking and integral to the mystery, and the next chapter distracted me with the personal lives of the detectives on the case.

This book is the only book in the series I have read, but I didn’t feel lost. It was very easy to get into, despite the fact I have not read the first book.

However, I did feel the book was missing an edge I usually look for and enjoy in a thriller. I was certainly driven to finish to book and really enjoyed reading it, but I didn’t feel an intense urgency or obsessiveness, which I love in thrillers.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend.

Another great read from this author. The victim telling her story right up to the outcome, to the police trying to solve the crime. Great characters. A thoroughly good read very hard to put down.

Louise wakes up with a hangover (again) - she doesn’t remember much about the night before, and once again that’s become the norm. As she slowly gathers her thoughts, she realises that the bedsheets are soaked in blood, and even worse, there’s a dead man lying next to her, and it’s not her husband - in fact, she has no idea who he is.

Not unnaturally, Louise is the prime suspect here, and gradually, she tells us her own backstory, as she wrestles with details of events leading up to that fateful discovery. Day by day, the ordeal goes on within her head, compounded by her inability to remember just what happened, and her desire, AND fear, to uncover who murdered the stranger in her bed.

This was a clever, intense, and gripping page turner. ‘Lie Beside Me’ delves into the background and circumstances of a tense, unnerving murder mystery, where personal relationships come under pressure, and the ground shifts constantly for DCI Jonah Sheens and his team, as they seek a solution to this shocking and mysterious murder.

Gytha Lodge's latest in the DCI Jonah Sheens and his police team based in Southampton is an intricate, complex, multilayered, character driven psychological thriller that confirms Lodge's reputation as a brilliant crime writer. Musician Louise Reakes wakes up early one cold and snowy morning with no memory of the night before, and lying in her blood drenched bed beside her is a dead man she has never seen before. Horrified, her husband Niall abroad on a conference, expected to return later today, she moves the body to her garden and calls the police. Louise was a timid personality, until the genesis of a new persona on the day she meets her new best friend, wealthy American April Dumont, along with Niall, her husband to be.

She becomes Drunk Louise, a sparkling, confident, sociable and witty woman that people want to know until she begins to lose control, experiencing an increasing number of blackouts where she cannot remember what she did. As her life unravels, we slowly learn of her deteriorating relationship and marriage to Niall, her insecurities and hatred of Dina, Niall's ex-wife, and the nature of her friendship with April, a rock solid support and totally loyal woman, yet contributing to Louise's increasing dependence on drink. The dead man turns out to be fitness instructor, Alex Plaskett, in a same sex marriage to Issa Benhawy. As Louise's memories of that fateful night begin to return in bits and pieces, a clarity descends on her that it is up to her to find out what happened that night and address the mess she has made of her life.

Sheen remains largely in the background, a strong hand guiding the investigation, whilst the focus is on the rest of the team, the dependable and reliable DS Ben Lightman, Domnall O'Malley and DC Juliette Hansen in particular. Hansen left behind a abusive relationship and partner, Damian, in Birmingham. However, Damian has refused to leave her alone, stalking her, trashing her reputation with work colleagues, intent on destroying any new relationship she might develop, leaving her living in fear and constant paranoia. Just like Louise, Juliette finds herself facing challenges that push her into confronting the issues that look set to destroy her life. This is a riveting and compulsive read, with twists galore, it is tense and suspenseful right up to the end of the novel. I can't wait to read the next in this wonderful series! Many thanks to Penguin Michael Joseph for an ARC.

I absolutely enjoyed reading Lie Beside Me by Gytha Lodge, this is the third book of the DCI Sheens series. I think I possibly enjoyed it more than the first in the series.

Louise wakes up in bed after a heavy night out and discovers a dead man that she doesn’t know lying next to her. He has clearly been murdered with a stab wound in his stomach. Louise has no memory of meeting this man and believes that she may have killed him herself.

We have all been there once or twice, where we have had one too many on a night out and cannot recall getting home or going to bed. But imagine waking up in a pool of blood and a dead man. This is stuff of your worst nightmare!

A really enjoyable read, it was good to finally read something that I didn’t want to put down and whizzed through so quickly.

Fabulous!

This is a book of two halves. The police side is brilliantly written and a real page turner. The other half I found difficult to read and I certainly could not warm to the characters on this side. The plot is clever and has many surprises in it and in spite of my reservations I could therefore recommend this book to all crime story readers

This was a great addition to the series. An intriguing mystery with lots of twists and turns. I enjoyed seeing how the different threads came together.