Blurring fact and fantasy is my trade. I am a con artist. A prevaricator. I make up stories.
So why does he think this one is real?
Thriller writer Liza Cole (though I initially kept wanting to call her Liza Cody) is under pressure. A lot of pressure. Her publisher is pushing her to deliver her next novel. She's struggling to get pregnant, undergoing experimental fertility treatment. And on top of everything her husband David's best friend and law partner, Nick, has mysteriously disappeared, leaving David distraught and distracted.
The unusual structure alternates between Liza's narrative and chapters of the novel she is writing, in which protagonist Beth, a new mother, discovers her husband is having an affair - with explosive consequences. (Liza was told that the protagonist of her last, critically-panned, novel "lacked agency". It's not a criticism that can be applied to Beth.) But where does fact end and fiction begin? As secrets old and new begin to emerge, the line between imagination and reality becomes increasingly blurred.
This novel-within-a-novel structure, stories bleeding into one another, reminded me a little of Morag Joss's excellent The Night Following - although the two books are very different in tone.
It did take me a while to get into, as I got used to the parallel storylines. But once I was grabbed, that was it - I had to keep reading.
There were a couple of things (I won't say what) which in hindsight seem blindingly obvious but took me a shamefully long time to notice. So I guess maybe they weren't that obvious after all. Hiding in plain sight, perhaps.
I did wonder how childless Liza managed to know quite so much, and write quite so convincingly, about the minutiae of life with a new baby. Research is one thing, but it read very much like experience.
A very intriguing and very, very cleverly constructed story; the sort you immediately want to go back and read parts of again in the light of later revelations. I love it when that happens.
Former journalist and television producer Cate Holahan is the author of three novels, of which Lies She Told is the most recent.
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