Very clever story of two different girls Betsy and Kayla.

Kayla is a poor student who has been in foster care as her mother is an alcoholic. Her mother has been sober for 3 years and has finally won back custody of 17 year old Kayla. Kayla's best friend is a rich girl on the cheerleading squad who 's mother wants to buy her everything to alleviate her middle class guilt. Kayla is learning to stand up for herself and has just started a job at the low budget supermarket. She walks home every night to a very dodgy neighborhood where her mother lives. (The man next door is a drug addict). To make matters worse, there is a serial killer on the loose in town, and 3 girls have been raped and murdered nearby. Into Kayla's life comes Jordan - 19, suave and good looking. Then one night, Kayla is chased home by a man in black after work - who is the serial killer? And is Jordan too good to be true?

Betsy - there is a secret black phone under the bed. She and her mother have moved to a town bordering Mexico from North Dakota is their cover story. Her mother has a job at a florist and the shop next door is a Mexican restaurant. Betsy befriends the very pregnant 19 year old girl called Happy, who is related to the restaurant owners. In the kitchen is Adrian a few years older. Adrian looks at Betsy suspiciously and Happy's boyfriend thinks that Betsy is a narc. Everyone in the town seems to have something shady going on, but what is Betsy's story? What is the black phone she must constantly answer and why is she so freaked out about Happy and Adrian's totem of a golden fish?

Loved how the plot keeps you guessing until the last few chapters. For mature readers due to language, sex, drug abuse and violent crime, but gripping until the very end. Students will LOVE this book. ( )

This book was both disturbing and yet addicting. It pulled me in from the first page and I could not put it down until I finished it. Read it in a few hours. A thriller with some great twists!
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for this ARC. ( )

You may remember that I put this book on my Highlights list for December of 2017, perhaps a gamble to do since teen thrillers/mysteries can be so dicey sometimes. I feel like I either really enjoy them, or find them too cliche or unbelievable. I didn’t really know what to expect from “The Truth Beneath The Lies”, as this is Amanda Searcy’s debut novel and the description was vague as vague can be. But I decided to take a page from ABBA and took a chance on it. And I’m not totally sure if it paid off.

It took me a little time to really get into this book. The first problem was that I had to keep reminding myself which girl was Betsy and which girl was Kayla. As you will find in a fair number of mysteries and thrillers these days, “The Truth Beneath The Lies” has a unique storytelling hook (in this case, two distinct narratives that seem separate but will eventually come together to tell a larger story), and a premise and set up that initially provide more questions than answers (and since I feel that this story definitely needs a lack of answers and clarity to be effective, I’m going to try and be, like the description, as vague as possible). The problem, however, was that Kayla and Betsy had so many interchangeable elements to their stories that I really had a hard time at first with keeping them straight. I can’t tell you how many times I had to say ‘okay, which one is this, who has the burner phone and who is working at a grocery store?’ and then look at the book description again. Of the two narratives I was more taken in by Kayla’s story (and even now I had to go back and remind myself who was who), as her frustrating existence made it so her motivations and choices were clearer. While Betsy’s situation was secretive for a reason, it still made it so I was irritated with just how much we were reminded that she was in danger, without explaining why. It all makes sense, but even though it does I still found myself more frustrated than intrigued.

The big twist wasn’t too hard for me to guess either. If you know what to look for and have the ins and outs of the genre in it’s present form down cold, you will probably be able to piece it together at the same rate that I did. And while that certainly isn’t to say that everyone will, or that they will be unimpressed with it, it did take away from my personal experience of reading this. Again, I’m going to remain a bit mum on what I mean by this, because I think that this is potentially worth reading if you aren’t as old hat and cynical as I am. But also figuring out the whole puzzle early on made me question whether or not how Searcy laid the clues out, and even in how she frames major parts of this story, treaded more towards deceit rather than deception. If you read this you will understand what I mean when I say that.

But I will say that ultimately, when all was said and done, I was entertained by this book. Once the cat was out of the bag plot wise, I did want to see how things turned out for our characters, and the consequences that were going to fall upon them all. So in the end it’s not like I regret reading this book, it was just that it didn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to thrillers, or even YA thrillers. It was perfectly acceptable, but the problem is that with thrillers with twists and turns it’s more fun to be thrilled. ( )