Then She Lied

At sixteen, or thereabouts, a girl walked into a police station wearing a blood-stained hospital gown. She could not say who she was, where she had come from or what had been done to her. Nobody came looking for her. The authorities gave her a new name, Jane, and she built a life from nothing.

Twenty years on, that life is stable enough that she has stopped expecting the past to find her. Then human remains are discovered in a pond on Long Island, and fragments of that night begin to return. Jane understands that she has to go to the police and tell them what she now remembers.

But every recovered memory raises the stakes. The more Jane learns about the girl she used to be, the more she suspects that forgetting may have been a mercy. She is racing to uncover the truth before the police reach it first, and before the people who have spent two decades protecting an old secret decide she is a risk they cannot afford.

Then She Lied is a psychological thriller built around a heroine who cannot fully trust her own mind, set against buried crimes and a clock that is already running. It will suit readers who enjoy the work of Catherine Steadman, Alice Feeney and Laura Dave.