Review: The Lying Woods by Ashley Elston
SYNOPSIS:
Owen Foster has never wanted for anything. Then his mother shows up at his elite New Orleans boarding school cradling a bombshell: his privileged life has been funded by stolen money. After using the family business, the single largest employer in his small Louisiana town, to embezzle millions and drain the employees’ retirement accounts, Owen’s father vanished without a trace, leaving Owen and his mother to deal with the fallout.
Owen returns to Lake Cane to finish his senior year, where people he can barely remember despise him for his father’s crimes. It’s bad enough dealing with muttered insults and glares, but when Owen and his mother receive increasingly frightening threats from someone out for revenge, he knows he must get to the bottom of what really happened at Louisiana Frac–and the cryptic note his father sent him at his boarding school days before disappearing.
Owen’s only refuge is the sprawling, isolated pecan orchard he works at after school, owned by a man named Gus who has his own secrets–and in some ways seems to know Owen better than he knows himself. As Owen uncovers a terrible injustice that looms over the same Preacher Woods he’s claimed as his own, he must face a shocking truth about his own past–and write a better future.
REVIEW:
*Book Received in Exchange for Honest Opinion/Review*
I immensely enjoyed this book, as my first Ashley Elston book, it blew me out of the water! Ashley truly has a craft for flawlessly combining overlapping story lines, tangled emotions, and complex characters into a cohesive story that hooks the reader and leaves you captivated and wanting more. Once I started the book, I couldn’t put it down. I was hypnotized by the endless questions, when one was solved, not only would another pop up but there were at least five others floating around in my mind.
This is what I believe makes for an excellent mystery story, when I am in a constant state of questioning and suspense. But not so much suspense that the whole narrative is revolving around a build up you know is going to let you down. Ashley brings in romance, family drama, high school drama, and family friends to graph a compelling plot that I want to know it all…at once! Give me the answers!
All the characters are multidimensional but none top Owen, who is trying to navigate high school, scandal, betrayal, and secrets. Oh the secrets in this book gave me whiplash, and left me utterly speechless. But while all this is going on, Owen is surprising relate-able and I think this is Ashley’s ability to portray the emotional struggle of her characters. I was drowning in the shock and revelations right along side Owen, I felt his frustration and struggle for answers and in return I sympathized for him and wanted to cheer him on in his search for the truth.
The mystery is thick and when everything was revealed, I had to actually pause for a moment because WHAT JUST HAPPENED?! I did not see that coming, I was left reeling while desperately clinging to hope. No, no, this isn’t your typical gruesome, murder mystery. This is the type of mystery that has you trying to piece together clues but the puzzle piece that holds solution is elusive. I was left guessing how everything was going to play out till the very end. And in all honesty, as I closed the book, I was left a sh*t eating grin on my face because d*mn that was a good book. I will definitely be re-reading it down the road!
LINKS:
Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes and Noble
