1913 sees the deaths of Scott and his four companions who set out to reach the South Pole only to find that Roald Amundsen had gotten there first. Demoralised, defeated, & despite their efforts suffering from varying degrees of frostbite & malnutrition, the five men fail to return. Fellow explorer Cherry-Garrard hikes out to One Ton depot as agreed but sees no sign of them. Their bodies are found a year later just ten miles from the depot & Cherry-Garrard lives with feeling of guilt for the rest of this life.

1969 - WWII orphan Falcon Grey who grew up on Cherry-Garrard's estate is left a small bequest in the will which includes a red notebook found in Scott's tent. This diary tells a different story to the official version & it seems that Scott & his companions were sabotaged & their deaths were cold-blooded murder. There are many suspects including the groups of men who were not chosen to strike out for the pole. Grey soon comes to realise that someone has a lot to hide & they want it to remain hidden - forever.

I love books based on true events especially mountaineering or Arctic/Antarctic exploration, so this fictional mystery take seemed tailor-made for me. The sections on the Scott journey were indeed riveting & it was a pity that so much of the book was focussed on Grey's private life leading up to being bequeathed the diary. It was very slow & the pace didn't really pick up until about 70% of the way through, which was disappointing. I really didn't care about his relationship with Sofya. A missed opportunity for me.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

The White Lie is that rare novel that manages to take an incident of reality and weave it into a fictional narrative until the reader actually forgets there is a fine line between truth and lies. Way outside my usual comfort zone with this but JG (Jim) Kelly has an enviable crime back catalogue which I've been enjoying for years so, with The Silent Child last year and now this new novel, I was very happy to trust him with historical genres.

With The White Lie, we're given the story of Scott of the Antarctic, and timelines that swing mostly from 1913 to the late 1960s, when a private diary is inherited by Falcon Grey - the diary purports to suggest that Scott and his team did not perish on the ice from natural causes but that nefarious schemes were at play. Grey has been, in effect, challenged by the owner of the diary to prove this, and thus a whole host of joyously dislikeable characters are introduced as Grey begins the quest to track down survivors from that early expedition. Locations and periods are moved between swiftly as the story progresses and distractions are not recommended - the denouement did come from a slight tangent even though I was thoroughly immersed! I'll definitely be interested to see what the author decides to write next.

With thanks to Hodder Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.

I really liked the idea of this book, linking the Scott’s last polar expedition and incidents in WWII together; putting well known events and characters into a novel and making it believable is a tricky thing to get right. The link between the events is nicely written by the author and brought the reality of the conditions for the explorers to the reader really well. Also Scott’s expedition is very well documented in real life, making it even more important that the author had done a thorough job with research into the era, which I thought he obviously had done.

Falcon Grey, an orphan who was brought up by one of the explorers, is a complex and interesting character, being moulded by the death of his parents during WWII, and the survivors guilt he felt rang very true. I couldn’t empathise with Sofiya but I’m not sure we were meant to, despite her own tortured background. I didn’t expect the ending, and not quite sure if that bit worked, but it’s definitely a good read, especially for anyone with a particular interest in Captain Scott and his I’ll fated death. 3 1/2 ⭐️

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.