Ruth Ware ups the suspense in 'The Lying Game'

By Ruth Ware

Scout Press. 370 pp. $26.99 nolead ends

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Reviewed by Ginny Greene

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In 2015, British novelist Ruth Ware made a splash with her debut thriller, In a Dark, Dark Wood. It was a winning formula: Old chums from high school are reunited after more than a decade when the alpha female announces her wedding plans and invites her once besties to a remote English cabin for a "hen party," the British equivalent of a bachelorette weekend. Kept secrets and new betrayals emerge, really bad things happen, and we're not certain until the final pages who is behind all the mayhem.

Ware followed with The Woman in Cabin 10, a suspenseful cocktail of intrigue at sea, rich cruise passengers doused with too much alcohol and suddenly surrounded by peril in inescapable icy waters. It, too, raced up the best-seller lists.

In her latest, Ware is back to her inaugural theme, women reunited to face the horrors of the past. The story has roots in a second-class boarding school on the gloomy English coast. Our girl chums have all been banished from home for one reason or another and seem to have little in common until a mean-spirited lying challenge pulls them together. They prank and torment fellow students, faculty, and townspeople so much that these British "mean girls" become outcasts, which unites them even more tightly.

Their fraught friendship is upended by a dark secret that pulls each girl in, then scatters them apart. And years later, when the alpha friend sends an urgent text - "I need you" - the conspirators come running, just as they knew they would one day.

Ware writes with sharp dialogue and rich psychological drama. If you liked her earlier works, you just may love The Lying Game.

This review originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.