Publication Date September 24, 2024
I’m not sure why, among the 1,875 books I have on goodreads, there isn’t a single one by Tami Hoag…especially after repeatedly seeing the huge number of positive reviews for the Broussard and Fourcade series. For sure, reviews don’t guarantee anything, but in any case I thought the combination of Louisiana bayou, Detective and sidekick, and intriguing mystery sounded promising and something even my husband (a huge fan of James Lee Burke) might enjoy.
Hoag is known for her strong characters, which is evident early on in Bad Liar, as we are introduced to characters: “...there she sat, alone in her kitchen, drinking warm chardonnay in the glow of the undercabinet lighting, in a backwater town in sour Louisiana. A place she didn’t belong. A fact she was reminded of daily by people she didn’t like and who didn’t like her. People who had pulled her husband back here on the leash of obligation and loyalty, dragging her along, an unwanted accessory.” Seriously, I was hooked early on!
Nick Fourcade and his wife Antoinette (“Annie” Broussard) are the main characters in this thriller. Nick is involved in a case involving a half naked male corpse, the first in a series of dead males, while Annie is trying to help a woman who came to the sheriff’s office begging for help finding her missing son Robbie Fontenot (a former football star, now a drug addict). Dismissed as probably just another dead junkie who probably overdosed, no one is making any effort to help her until Annie comes along. As Annie pondered the situation with this case of Robbie, “a much-loved child of comfort and opportunity” who “… had the world rolled out in front of him like a red carpet…He had lost it all. Thrown it away, some would say, though addiction wasn’t as simple as choice. Resentment of privilege more often than not erased the sympathy of casual observers to a train wreck life. That was just how people were–jealous and petty. But life was only black and white to those lucky enough to never have been faced with real adversity.” Nick and Annie both have experience dealing with various characters and situations, and Nick realizes “People found all kinds of excuses to do the most terrible things.”
There are multiple bodies along the way, and while it’s impossible to tell more without spoiling the story, I just loved it and came away with an appreciation of Tami Hoag and a desire to read more of her other books, particularly others in the Fourcade-Broussard series (Bad Liar is #3, following A Thin Dark Line and The Boy. With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group for providing a copy of Bad Liar in exchange for my honest review, this one gets 5 stars.