REVIEW: Everyone Is Lying To You by Jo Piazza

JennieB+ Reviews / Book Reviews / Recommended Readsmotherhood / mystery / thriller / Trad WivesNo Comments

Dear Ms. Piazza:

I came across this book shortly after reading Yesteryear and could not resist taking the plunge with what felt like the suspense version of that novel (FWIW, Everyone is Lying to You came out last year). This ended up being a pretty successful read.

The novel opens with Lizzie lying in bed and stalking her old friend Bex’s Instagram account. Bex, now Rebecca, has become a farm-trad-wife influencer with millions of followers (even her three-legged goat, Tripod, has 1.2 million followers on his dedicated Instagram account).

Lizzie and Bex’s intense college friendship ended abruptly some years before, and Lizzie has not gotten over the sting of Bex’s unexplained rejection. She’s happily married, with two children, but life is stressful. Her husband, a magazine writer like her, has been laid off and is trying to write a novel. Lizzie herself feels that her job in the dying magazine industry is hanging by a thread, and she’s trying to balance the considerable demands of motherhood to young children with holding onto her career. Perhaps as a release, she finds herself scrolling Bex’s account fairly often, to her husband’s confusion. Lizzie is shocked when a DM from Bex pops up as she’s mid-scroll.

After all this time, Bex wants to talk about an opportunity – an exclusive interview with Lizzie that will preview a big brand deal that Bex’s about to announce. Bex has never given any interviews so the idea is intriguing to Lizzie – it might give her career a boost just when she needs it most. And she is curious about her old friend and the (to Lizzie) bizarre new persona she has adopted.

Bex has six kids and an unhappy marriage to Gray, wealthy scion of a farming family. She has guilt about how her friendship with Lizzie ended, but beyond that she needs Lizzie’s help. The two meet at a luxurious resort in an unidentified western state near Bex’s ranch. There’s a huge conference (“MomBomb”) of female influencers and Bex has chosen this spotlight to make her big announcement.

Lizzie finds the resort a welcome respite from her hectic life, but the world of mommy influencers odd and foreign. Before she even connects with Bex, she runs into a gaggle of other MomBombers:

There’s a crew of ladies waiting by the elevator, four of them in the same flower print beach cover-ups, each holding a Stanley Cup the size of a newborn baby. Peter has a theory that everyone these days is overhydrated and it’s leading to their brains drowning in idiocy. “I drank nothing but beer and weak tea for three years in university and I passed all my exams with flying colors,” he says every time a teacher chastises us for forgetting the two water bottles required for each child for day care.

The women are shit-talking and Lizzie realizes that the subject of their vitriol is Bex; she is surprised to find herself feeling protective of her old friend after all these years. Shortly after she connects with Bex herself and one of the first things Lizzie notices is the bruise around her eye that Bex has tried to conceal with makeup.

Lizzie and Bex have a one-night reunion in which they re-bond and Lizzie learns, mostly in an oblique way, about how unhappy Bex’s marriage is. She also learns a bit about Bex’s brand deal, which Bex confesses Gray doesn’t know about and won’t be happy about.

Bex departs for the night promising they will have plenty of more time to talk and catch up, but the next day, Lizzie can’t find her. Then the cops arrive at the conference and Lizzie (and all the MomBombers) find out: Bex’s husband Gray has been found murdered, and Bex and her children are missing.

In the aftermath, and after being grilled by the police, Lizzie meets Olivia, a mover and shaker in the momfluencer world and apparently Bex’s accountant, manager and attorney. When Bex reaches out again for help, Lizzie is plunged into the mystery of who killed Gray and why Bex is hiding.

I liked the snappy writing, as when Bex muses about the other women at MomBomb:

I spy Marybeth Kelsey. She’s got more than three million followers on her account about finding true love when you least expect it after divorce. Except she’s currently separated from her second husband in real life and continuing to post about their happy union because it will destroy their brand if she tells anyone they are splitting before their big five-year vow renewal at Disney in the fall. They’ve got it all planned for Cinderella’s castle and no one ever says no to that sweet, sweet Disney sponsorship money. Once it starts flowing it will keep going for years unless you take a shit on Space Mountain.

I liked both Lizzie and Bex; Bex is probably given a bit more grace than I think she maybe deserves for her choices (I’m ambivalent about mommy influencers; I don’t hate them the way a lot of people seem to, but I will agree that that world can be problematic). Lizzie is more sympathetic and relatable but ultimately they are both characters that I was rooting for, so I was glad that this wasn’t one of those darker, nasty thrillers (I’ve read a few too many of those lately). My grade for Everyone is Lying to You is a B+.

Best

Jennie

AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle

Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

→ Jennie