Mary, Mary, Mary. Were you cruising toward summer? Basking in the glory of the good reviews of The Good Girl or Pretty Baby?? Whatever the reason, I could hardly WAIT to settle in with the advance copy of your latest, Every Last Lie (which I was happy to receive from Harlequin/Park Row Books & NetGalley in exchange for my honest review), and I emerged disappointed..

This is a standalone suspense/mystery thriller, and like many recent domestic psychological thrillers, it is told from alternating perspectives of main characters: in this case a young married couple, Nick and Clara Solberg. Their tragedy is flat out smack in our faces (actually jarring) right at the beginning to the novel.

A few days after Clara has given birth to their son, Nick takes their precocious 4-year-old daughter Maisie to her ballet lessons, phoning Clara on the way to ask what kind of takeout food she’d like him to pick up. Nick never makes it home as he and Maisie are in a terrible car crash that leaves him dead while Maisie escapes with just a scratch.

As if the overwhelming grief of losing her husband isn’t enough, Clara begins to believe that it wasn’t an accident as the police have determined, but that he was murdered. Clara goes through various suspects trying to determine who it was that ran them off the road causing Nick’s death. She basically covers all the bases including friends, family, co-workers – you name it, Clara is at one time or another sure that several people must be the criminal.

So, the story is a fast read and as usual Kubica does a great job developing the characters into people we KNOW and care about, and moving the action along with events as well as dialogue. The problem for me was there were several red herrings, and the story was building and building toward the big reveal, than it just didn’t work for me.

The way the story is told, with Clara’s post-crash chapters alternating with Nick’s pre-crash chapters works well, and the reader cycles through pity, sympathy, etc. along with the characters.

I think Kubica’s fans will love this, and I would recommend it selectively to a certain type of reader. I can only give it three stars, and I have thought for hours about whether it was just that my expectations were too high. I concluded that wasn’t the case, and while I am still a Kubica fan, I hope that in her next book she returns to the terrific level of thriller writing her fans expect.

Three stars.