The Fine Art of Lying is Alexandra Andrews’s highly anticipated sophomore novel, coming 5 years after her debut Who is Maud Dixon? (which I have not yet read). I decided to pick this one up due to it being a book club pick and having just finished it literally this morning, I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. While the writing flowed well and this was a relatively quick, easy read, I did struggle somewhat with certain aspects of the story as well as the characters (which I will get back to in a bit).
First, I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree with majority of the reviewers who mention that the thriller / suspense aspect of the book fell extremely flat. I think for me, the problem was the structure – the first half of the book focused mostly on setting up the background for the crime that eventually takes place, with the main protagonist Clare Bast trying to overcome the “imposter syndrome” she feels after marrying into an uber wealthy family and having to navigate the complicated dynamics that come with it. Clare ends up having an extramarital affair with a charismatic art dealer and soon finds herself sucked into the unfortunate predicament of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a murder and robbery take place, The second half of the story then pivots to focusing on the mystery and, of course, figuring out what happened and why. The way the story unfolded, the “final reveal” ended up being anti-climactic and the “solving” part pertaining to the murder and robbery lacked any feeling of suspense or thrill. Sure, there were some surprising moments that I’m guessing were supposed to be “twists” but those were written in a way where the “twist” part barely registered.
Having said all that, one area where I seem to digress from many of the other reviewers is that, despite the lack of suspense / thriller elements, I actually liked the second half of the story more than the first half. The reason for this has more to do with me as a reader rather than problems with the book itself. With a few exceptions, I’m overall not a fan of the “rich people behaving badly” trope and unfortunately, this book not only had that in spades, the trope pretty much turned out to be the premise of the entire story. As such, I could not stand any of the characters in the story and especially not the protagonist Clare, who honestly irritated me to no end because she fit exactly the type of pathetically ridiculous “let me see how many stupid decisions I can get away with making and then berate myself endlessly over those decisions” character that I find frustrating and hugely annoying. As if that weren’t enough though, what made Clare even more annoying (for me at least) was how she kept trying to find excuses for her behavior and actions, but those excuses were not just ridiculous, but also contradictory and nonsensical. For example – one minute, Clare would be claiming that she was naïve, but then the next minute, she would say that she recognized she was being reckless, but oh well, whatever, she was going to forge ahead anyway knowing full well what the consequences would be; then later, she seems to contradict both of those excuses when she claims that she had merely “let her attention wander” and next thing she knew, she “became someone else” and failed to notice it in time. Clare was, of course, referring to her extramarital affair, which, because it occupied a huge swath of the book’s first half, was the reason why I preferred the second half of the book to the first half. No, it’s not because Clare was less irritating in the second half (she never stopped being annoying in my opinion), but because the second half was more focused on solving the mystery rather than Clare’s behavior and actions. Basically, for me, the first half of the story can be summed up as “Clare and her reckless actions makes a trainwreck of her life and even when she recognizes this, she keeps doing it anyway because she doesn’t seem to have the willpower to stop herself from being reckless” (the word “reckless” actually appears so many times throughout the book that I can’t help but wonder whether this is the author’s favorite word?).
Overall, I found this to be an okay read – not great but not horrible either (hence why I decided to rate this one 3 stars, which, for me, is the happy medium). I think the key with this one is to go into it with the right expectations – meaning don’t expect a thrill ride, but rather a slow-burn literary mystery of sorts that takes time to unravel. Some parts of the story also requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but that’s to be expected given the nature of the genre. I usually enjoy literary mysteries more than suspense/thrillers, but this one in particular didn’t really work for me, mostly because of the unlikeable characters, though of course, this is just me and my specific tastes, so I would suggest also checking out other reviews before deciding whether to pick this up or not.
