Lies You Wanted to Hear, by James Whitfield Thomson

Lies You Wanted to Hear

By James Whitfield Thomson

Sourcebooks Landmark, 2013

416 pages

This is the most suspenseful love story I have ever read!

In the late 1970s, in Boston, Lucy and Matt are set up by a mutual friend. Lucy is trying to get over Griffin, a man unable to commit, and Matt is just willing to go on a date. Although they come from different backgrounds, Matt is a cop who grew up in small town Pennsylvania, and Lucy is a recent college grad with an admin job at Harvard, who comes from a wealthy Connecticut family, they fall in love, and eventually marry after Lucy gets pregnant. But their love is never equal and this creates complications. Told in alternating chapters the book explores both sides of their love story and the pain of having children with someone who does not turn out to be the partner you wished they would become.

The book opens with Lucy in the 1990s, and she is living alone, establishing in the first pages that Lucy and Matt’s marriage ends. Thomson builds suspense around the how and why, skillfully twisting and turning the story, until he lands on what I found to be a satisfying and realistic note. This is a family drama—a story of love and betrayal. And because the book is set up to explore how their love ends, the story is infused with suspense not often found in love stories.

Thomson lives in Boston with his family. He is publishing this debut in his 60s–another example that there is room for older debut novelists–and did not publish his first short story until he was forty.

I received an e-copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.