Every Last Lie

April 3, 2017
Bestseller Kubica returns to form with this chilling psychological thriller after 2016’s disappointing Don’t You Cry. One sunny day, while dozing at home with newborn Felix, Clara Solberg expects the knock at the door to be husband Nick bringing four-year-old Maisie back from ballet; instead it’s a cop notifying her about a car crash that’s left her husband in a Chicago-area hospital, already brain-dead. The news is unthinkable, almost as impossible for her to credit as the notion that Nick could have been speeding around a hairpin turn with Maisie in the back seat. But once the shell-shocked widow begins digging, it starts to look as though the accident—if it was an accident—could be only one part of their lives that’s significantly more sinister than appearances suggested. Although Kubica allows an increasingly unhinged Clara to pinball too freely among various paranoid scenarios, she shows herself once again to be a master of suspenseful manipulation (and occasionally misdirection) with her shuffling of narrators and chronology. Agent: Rachael Dillon Fried, Greenburger Associates.

April 15, 2017
When a dentist dies in a car accident, he leaves behind a rattled and questioning wife who must try to come to terms with his death--and what she suspects may be his murder.Nick Solberg practices dentistry in the Chicago suburbs, where he lives with his wife, Clara, daughter, Maisie, and newborn son, Felix. But when Felix is 4 days old, Nick is killed while driving Maisie home from ballet class. Although the girl is unharmed, she keeps telling her mother that a "bad man" was after them. Convinced that Nick's death wasn't an accident--despite official police findings--Clara digs through her husband's life and finds a man of many contradictions. Told from alternating viewpoints--we hear from Nick before the accident and Clara both immediately before and then after the crash--the story weaves in and out of Nick's impending ruin. As Clara skirts telling Maisie her father is dead, Nick skirts telling Clara they're facing impending financial doom, hiding it any way he can. Clara's bizarre reaction to her husband's death snowballs into total denial that he could have engineered it himself; she continues to lie to her daughter, latching on to clues she's convinced will prove he was murdered. While Nick's narrative fills in many of the blanks Clara's finding, Clara remains in the dark about his activities and keeps dipping into her growing belief that Nick was murdered to point the finger at everyone--even family members--who comes into her line of sight. When all is said and done, Clara, who should be sympathetic, is not only a questionable mother, but also a not-very-reliable narrator who won't earn many points with readers. And after a big buildup, the ending falls flat and is forgettable. Overwritten and sloppy with an oddly polarizing protagonist.

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May 1, 2017
Clara Solberg is expecting her husband and daughter to arrive with dinner any moment when an officer delivers the news that they have been in a serious accident. Maisie, her four-year-old daughter, has escaped without harm, but her husband, Nick, dies from his injuries. Nick is an unrepentant speeder, so it's unsurprising when the police rule his death an accident. But, in the days following the accident, Maisie has night terrors and wakes screaming warnings to her father about the bad man following them in a black car. Then Clara finds that Nick recently canceled his life insurance without telling her and that he was on the phone when he crashed with someone whose number she doesn't recognize. With her world upended, Clara sees evidence of the bad man in Nick's best friend, her neighbor's glare, and in her own family. Kubica's fourth stand-alone is a compelling, if sedately paced, portrait of grief and coping chronicled through a wife's determined investigation of the lies she's discovered framing her life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2017

As Clara Solberg mourns the loss of her husband in a car crash from which four-year-old daughter Maisie miraculously escaped unharmed, Maisie starts having night terrors suggesting that this crash was no accident. From the author who started off big with The Good Girl; with a 300,000-copy first printing.

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