First Lie Wins – Book Review

Title:- First Lie Wins

Author:- Ashley Elston

Date published:- January 2nd 2024

No. of pages:- 340 pages

Genre:- Thriller

Rating:-

Plot:- 4/5

Writing:- 4/5

Overall rating:- 4/5

Evie Porter has everything a nice, Southern girl could want: a perfect, doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence and a garden, a fancy group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job will be different. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Because the one thing she’s worked her entire life to keep clean, the one identity she could always go back to—her real identity—just walked right into this town. Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge…

First Lie Wins is actually a unique thriller. Evie Porter is a typical southern girl engaged to Ryan Somner and moving in with him together. But Evie Porter doesn’t exist. In reality, Evie’s name is not her real name and you can say that she was actually working for someone named Mr. Smith with a job–find information about her fiancé, Ryan Somner. In fact Evie Porter is a con artist. One day, Evie meets a woman who bore strong resemblance and who is using Evie’s real name–Lucca. Evie realizes that she was playing a cat and mouse chase game with her boss and she must act before her boss does.

The story at first started out slow but after first fifty pages, then things started to get interesting and unputdownable. You get snippets of Evie’s past life as Lucca, her name aliases she used whenever she was working for the boss. The writing was really greater and I like the fact that the thriller despite being a slow burn, it was overall interesting and unique and couldn’t put the book down because I really am curious about how the story was going to end. The ending was satisfactory and above all, I actually enjoyed this book and really believe that the book is worth the hype.

I also liked Evie’s character well. She is intelligent, smart and at the same time compassionate about the others. I also liked the fact that she started to stop working for Mr. Smith and her working camaraderie with Devon. The whole book is told in Evie’s POV dividing between the present day and the scenes when she was working as a con artist working in different cities under a different name.

If you have read Finlay Donovan series, First Lie Wins maybe a great choice for you. I cannot wait to read more books from this author. Worth 4 stars!