“Careful what you lie for…” teases the cover of Sophie Stava’s debut novel, COUNT MY LIES. In this work of domestic suspense, readers are treated to a diabolical plot, characters you can’t bear to look away from, and, of course, an explosive ending that upends everything you thought you knew.

Sloane Caraway is a liar through and through. Raised by a down-on-her-luck single mother, Sloane’s early years were dominated by frequent moves and painfully embarrassing new starts. You can only recite “Hi, I’m your new classmate, Sloane” so many times before the bored looks on the faces of your fellow students start to grate. So when Sloane is just young enough for her behavior to be acceptable, she begins to lie.

Sloane didn’t move to her new school from another district only an hour away; she moved from California --- Los Angeles, in fact. Her dad isn’t some deadbeat who got her mother pregnant before disappearing; he’s a Hollywood star. Oh, Sloane’s classmate is going horseback riding this weekend? Well, she does too, every weekend, on her grandmother’s estate. Sloane gets caught, of course, but her punishments don’t steer her away from lying. Instead, they make her better and better at it.

"Thanks to Stava’s taut plotting, the groundwork for getting to her explosive, shocking ending whisks you away almost like an airport sidewalk.... COUNT MY LIES reads like the natural successor to the 'unreliable narrator' trope, a fresh take on a beloved convention."

When we meet Sloane, she is 33 and desperately lonely. As ironic as it sounds, lying to get close to people requires holding them at a distance. After all, you can’t invite friends over to a mansion that doesn’t exist, just as much as you can’t go to the mall with them when you’ve already lied about extravagant weekend plans. To make matters worse, Sloane’s mother’s health has declined --- thanks to a lifetime of bending over toilets, inhaling fumes and scrubbing with chemicals --- so Sloane lives with her as a caregiver. Not that she could afford anything else anyway, not after what happened 18 months ago, when one of her lies cost her her career, her independence, and the house of cards she spent decades building.

So when a chance encounter with a drop-dead gorgeous man named Jay Lockhart --- and his four-year-old daughter, Harper --- affords her the opportunity to try on a new identity, Sloane can’t pass it up. Enter Caitlin, a 31-year-old nurse and former nanny who generously gave up her apartment to care for her ailing mother…temporarily (because, naturally, a cure is coming). Sloane (or, ahem, Caitlin) knows that she can’t always trust her instincts, but she's convinced that she felt a spark between her and Jay, who can give her the life she wants and deserves.

Okay, Jay has a wife. But when Sloane orchestrates an encounter with Violet, she sees an even bigger opportunity. Violet is elegant, sexy and privileged, but lonely as well. When the women strike up a casual friendship and learn that their fathers are from the same town, Sloane starts to wonder if maybe there’s a chance they could be sisters. Maybe that’s a little crazy, but sisters don’t always have to be blood. And isn’t there a saying about best friends being the sisters you never had?

As Sloane worms her way into Jay and Violet’s lives, her attraction to Jay cools, while her friendship with Violet ramps up. It doesn’t hurt that she genuinely adores Harper, and Violet seems to truly need her friendship and companionship.

But the closer Sloane gets to the couple, the more she starts to notice oddities in their marriage. There are no pictures of them, or their wedding, around their house (and with faces like theirs, you’d want to plaster yourself to every billboard you see); Violet claims she doesn’t drink (just like Sloane!), but Jay says she does; and then there’s the ex-boyfriend Violet mentions a little too wistfully…and the burner phone she hides in her closet (a closet that Sloane only saw the inside of when she was snooping, trying on Violet’s clothes and dreaming of becoming her). Everyone lies, of course, but Sloane was pretty certain that she topped the charts. Until she met Violet.

Alternating between both women’s perspectives (and even a snippet from Jay!), Sophie Stava pens a truly gripping, twisted thriller that asks how many lies is too many, and what one should do when the truth, rather than the lie, is the scariest thing of all. It’s a premise we’ve seen before, but never quite like this, and never quite so convincingly innocent until it isn’t. After all, who among us hasn’t told a white lie --- especially to an attractive stranger we’re hoping to entice? But what do you do when you run into that stranger again, when another lie is required to bolster the first? Stava answers that question and more, tracing the exquisite arc of Sloane’s lies, but also the pain they cause her and the tension she feels both internally and externally.

I can’t say that Sloane is likable, but she’s understandable to a point, and so morally and emotionally complex that you almost read her through your fingers, desperate for her next wrong move and dreading it. Violet, too, is wonderfully compelling, and her motives for what happens in the book are just pure enough that you can’t write her off as the enemy either. Perhaps that is the point: there are no heroes or villains here, but rather people so desperately drawn to things or ways of life that they are willing to do what the rest of us only daydream about, inventing their own fantasy lives and then fighting to make them real.

Above all, the novel is cleverly constructed, the kind of book you finish in one sitting not because it is simple or “popcorn” fiction, but because you cannot look away. Thanks to Stava’s taut plotting, the groundwork for getting to her explosive, shocking ending whisks you away almost like an airport sidewalk. Perfect for readers of Kate Alice Marshall and Amy Tintera, COUNT MY LIES reads like the natural successor to the “unreliable narrator” trope, a fresh take on a beloved convention.

Reviewer’s note: No lies were told in this review.