Book review: She Lied First by Dinuka McKenzie

Wow… She Lied First by Dinuka McKenzie is a great read! It’s obvious McKenzie (well, her characters) are keeping secrets and perhaps fooling themselves (and potentially us), making them consciously or unconsciously remain in denial, but at the same time this book goes in an unexpected direction and flips everything we think we know…or that we’ve assumed.

About this book

Devika is living her best life, moving out of home in her final year of university. Close to the beach and away from her mother. Independent and self-sufficient, just like Kalyani. There's just one awful secret that Kal can never find out about.

Kalyani has it made. A new job. A unit she can afford, and her little sister as her roomie. She's finally achieved the life she's always wanted. Except for the one big thing she's yet to confide in Devi. A truth that gets harder to reveal the longer she waits.

When their lives are torn apart by betrayal, and Kal refuses to forgive her sister, Devi must peel back everything she thought she knew to rediscover Kalyani, lie by lie and secret by secret.

My thoughts

This is McKenzie’s first standalone book, complementing her popular series featuring Detective Kate Miles and this is a twisty read involving characters appearing in many shades of grey – perhaps making this a good bookclub read… allowing morals or ethics to be debated.

McKenzie’s lead character in her series (Kate) and here ( Devi and Kal) are of South Asian descent. I’m aware that McKenzie herself was born in Sri Lanka and appreciate that she’s promoting diversity and sharing characters we don’t often see represented in novels, including crime fiction.

We first meet Devi who’s our narrator for much of the first half of the novel. We learn that Devi’s traumatised or has experienced something and she’s been forced (by her mother) to seek therapy. She touches on the fact she’s sharing a house with her sister Kal but their relationship seems complicated… Devi seemingly easily angering her sibling. And of course we don’t have the context to understand why – which McKenzie cleverly keeps from us. From Devi we learn that somehow Kal was wronged in some way by a man (Nate), who perhaps has a reputation for mistreating women and (in the present) Devi’s stalking him to try to prove he hurt Kal. The Devi we meet in the first half of the novel is fragile and McKenzie communicates her trauma with limited needs for a trigger warning (p 52).

We do dip into Kal’s head in the first part briefly too, learning her secrets and are often privy to her version of something Devi has shared with us.

Then we flip to Kal ten months earlier and McKenzie deftly adds another layer of complexity into the mix as we discover we’ve been led astray… or at least made a number of incorrect assumptions. We also hear from Nate and also get a glimpse of his version of events, and later some self-reflection.

I had guessed what precipitated Devi’s unravelling here, but there’s more to that story… before and after. It’s hard to talk about it without giving anything away because it’s the twists that underpin everything making this a clever and bewitching read.

She Lied First by Dinuka McKenzie was published by Harper Collins Australia.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.