Title: Between the Lies

Author: Louise Tickle

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Publisher: Bath Publishing

Publication Date: 19th October 2023

Rating: 5/5

Cover:

Summary:

When it comes to families, is anyone a reliable witness?

Cherry Magraw can never forget the date her mother and brother were killed – the night of her ninth birthday. When her father was jailed for their murders, she lost everyone she loved.

Twenty years later, Cherry is a freelance journalist investigating domestic abuse and the secret world of the family courts, when she gets a letter from her father – still in prison for the killings – which contains a startling request.

From that point on, her past becomes entangled with her work, dismantling everything Cherry thought she knew about her family tragedy and plunging her into a dangerous of game of cat and mouse. Will her history cloud her judgement about another desperate family? And how far will she go to save someone else’s children?

Review:

Between the Lies is one of those books that genuinely cannot fail to make its readers think about the complex and harrowing subjects it covers. Cherry, a journalist with a massive trauma in her childhood, becomes embroiled in the court battle between a mother and father where the mother is trying to stop the father having unsupervised access to his children because of his alleged domestic abuse. Because of Cherry’s past, when her father was jailed for the death of her mother and brother, and Cherry herself was scarred for life, she finds herself unable to view the case she is covering as a journalist with the sense of detachment which is essential.

Between the Lies is gripping in the extreme, I couldn’t put it down, desperate to know how things would resolve themselves for Cherry and how she would reconcile herself with a past that scarred her in more ways than one. It is written with a real sense of sensitivity and a well researched honesty about the failings of the court and justice system. It is a book that will make you angry, as it should, about the way victims of domestic abuse are treated. However, it is also an extremely personal story about the fallibility of memory and perception – and how to cope with the unimaginable. Smart, harrowing, tense and incredibly moving, I couldn’t recommend Between the Lies more highly.

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Huge thanks to Claire Maxwell and Bath Publishing for having me on the tour and my copy of the book. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

Buy the book:

Waterstones | Blackwell’s | Amazon