Dec 26, 2013

{Blog Tour} Book Review + Giveaway: Girl of Lies - Charles Sheehan-Miles


Title: Girl of Lies (Rachel's Peril #1)
Author: Charles Sheehan-Miles
Release Date: December 17th 2013
Publisher: Cincinnatus Press
Age Group: New Adult
Source: eARC for blog tour
Andrea Thompson is smart, assertive and beautiful. She’s also desperately lonely. Raised in Europe by her grandmother, she struggles knowing neither of her parents wanted her, and she has no idea why.
When Andrea receives an urgent call from her older sister Carrie, she agrees to fly to the United States to help. Carrie’s newborn daughter Rachel needs a bone marrow transplant.
What Andrea doesn’t know is that her return to the United States will launch a chain of events that will uncover secrets hidden for decades. Secrets which will rock the Thompson family and ignite a political firestorm.
Secrets that some will kill to protect.
Girl of Lies is not the book I thought it would be. I've read A Song for Julia and The Last Hour from the first trilogy, Thompson Sisters, and although those two are by no means fun, sunny reads, this one is on a whole other level of distressed. I was introduced to it in The Last Hour, but in this book, the threat that the girls are in because of their family's connections to positions of power in the government is solidified and made very apparent.

The Thompson girls may have grown up with financial security, but that is all their dysfunctional parents have ever provided them with. They all feel neglected in many ways, but no one more so than Andrea, the youngest child in the family. I found it very strange how Andrea was shipped off to Spain to live with her grandmother when her mother would have kept her other daughters in a vise-like grip if she could. Andrea has long ago accepted it as a fact that her parents simply don't love her, but when her sisters start questioning it themselves, they all start digging around, finding answers to questions they'd - I'd - never thought to ask.

There was no moment of rest for any of the characters in this book, may they be the Thompson sisters or even the villains themselves. Everyone basically went around either looking for answers or covering up their asses, and although that made the story move painfully slow, I still couldn't stop reading. But soon enough, I got impatient and just wanted to get to the juicy parts; I think the author could have done without a few of the perspectives here and sped up the pace. Yet, as always, I was awed by how good he is at creating such diverse, fleshed-out characters and never confusing me even when they're all in one room.

Girl of Lies ended somewhat abruptly, making it feel like little to nothing was actually resolved, and that's something I didn't encounter in the first trilogy. I also think people who haven't read the previous books would be at least mildly confused when they read this because a truck-full of emotions carry over from those to this one. This book provided shocking answers to questions I'd asked in the previous books - "just what the hell is wrong with the Thompson parents" being the most major one - while raising a ton of new ones. So one thing's for sure: I'll be devouring the next book as soon as I can.

MY FAVORITE PARTS were learning the truth about Adelina, the girls' mother.

RATING:

About the author: 
Charles Sheehan-Miles has been a soldier, computer programmer, short-order cook and non-profit executive, and is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including the indie bestsellers Just Remember to Breathe and Republic: A Novel of America's Future. 

Find out more at http://www.sheehanmiles.com


Giveaway!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
 

No comments:

Post a Comment

I love reading your comments so post away! <3

Also, I appreciate the thought but this is now an award- and tag-free zone :D