'The highly anticipated third novel in the award-winning Ellery Hathaway mystery series.
'FBI agent Reed Markham is haunted by one painful unsolved mystery: who murdered his mother? Camilla was brutally stabbed to death more than forty years ago while baby Reed lay in his crib mere steps away. The trail went so cold that the Las Vegas Police Department has given up hope of solving the case. But then a shattering family secret changes everything Reed knows about his origins, his murdered mother, and his powerful adoptive father, state senator Angus Markham. Now Reed has to wonder if his mother's killer is uncomfortably close to home.
'Unable to trust his family with the details of his personal investigation, Reed enlists his friend, suspended cop Ellery Hathaway, to join his quest in Vegas. Ellery has experience with both troubled families and diabolical murderers, having narrowly escaped from each of them.
'Far from home and relying only on each other, Reed and Ellery discover young Camilla had snared the attention of dangerous men, any of whom might have wanted to shut her up for good. They start tracing his twisted family history, knowing the path leads back to a vicious killer—one who has been hiding in plain sight for forty years and isn't about to give up now.'
It's been a few years since I picked up a crime book. I used to read them a lot, and really enjoyed them, loving trying to see if I could figure out who the killer was before the characters in the book did. Because I'd not read anything in the genre for a while, outside of Sherlock Holmes books at least, I was nervous to get back into it, especially with the third boon in a series. I couldn't have been in better hands, however, as All The Best Lies proved to be not only one of the best crime stories I've read, but one of the most engaging character driven ones too.
The plot of All The Best Lies focuses on FBI investigator Reed Markham, who has taken on a forty year old cold case, that of the murder of his own mother. Having been raised with an adoptive family all his life, Reed's shocked when a recent DNA test reveals that his adoptive father is actually his biological father. Suddenly worried that their might be more undisclosed mysteries hidden in his past, and afraid that his dad might have had a part to play in his mothers death, he chooses to investigate.
I loved that the main story of the book is a cold case. So many times with crime novels it's about current killings, often serial killers, or cold cases where the killer suddenly reappears after years. The fact that there's nothing new going on here, that it's a crime well in the past instantly leapt out at me as so much more interesting. There's not a slew of witnesses, masses of evidence, or a race against the clock, instead Reed and Ellery have to fight for any scrap of evidence that they can find.
The people that the two of them had to interview had to remember back over forty years, struggling to help the investigators set up a timeline, and making proving alibis near impossible. Half the officers who originally investigated the case are either retired or dead.
If it wasn't for the personal stakes involved in the investigation I'm sure that the two of them would have given up. Thankfully, this personal involvement didn't just mean that there was incentive to keep the case going, but meant that I got a huge insight into both Reed and Ellery. Even though this is the third book in the series these insights meant that I never felt like I had missed out on anything. There was always a strong sense of who the characters were, their motivations and driving force.
The strong character development also meant that I found myself being dragged into the emotional story way more than I expected to be. I didn't know about the past adventures between Reed and Ellery, and whilst some of this was filled in for me I'd missed out on two books of the two of them together. Despite this, I became invested in their relationship, wanting the two of them to be able to get together, despite the huge hurdles that they would have to make it over to do so.
All The Best Lies didn't just rely on the romance between the two leads, however, but made family a hugely important part of the story, and not just Reed trying to find answers about his mothers death. His adoptive family played a big part, and there were moments of interaction between them that nearly broke me. There was one moment between Reed and his adoptive mother that actually make me cry a little. The fact that I found myself tearing up more than once during the story took me completely by surprise if I'm being honest.
I'd seen reviews about the rest of this series of books that described them as being hard to put down, and I find myself having to agree with that. I read the entirety of the book in a single day, something that I rarely do. Whilst this was helped that I was awake half the night with chronic pain, that was only a small factor as to why I didn't put the book down; desperately wanting to know what happened next was a much bigger factor.
All The Best Lies drew me in in ways that I wasn't expecting. It had a mystery that kept me engaged throughout whilst I tired to figure out who did it, with a satisfying conclusion that made sense and lived up to the mystery. The characters felt real, alive, and the character moments were some of the best bits of the book. This might have been the first entry in Joanna Schaffhausen's series that I read, but it's not going to be the last; I'm one hundred percent going to read the first two books, and can't wait for more to come out soon.
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