LAST YEAR'S "FINAL GIRLS," the first novel by the pseudonymous author Riley Sager, was praised by the thriller masters Stephen King and Karin Slaughter, earning comparisons to Gillian Flynn, the gold standard for smart psychological suspense. Sager's follow-up, "The Last Time I Lied," has what it takes to deliver the same chills: a creepy premise, a narrator with a haunted past and a series of delicious hints that portend a final, jaw-dropping bombshell that connects long-buried secrets to the present. The premise: Fifteen years ago, three teenage girls - Vivian, Natalie and Allison - sneaked out of their cabin at Camp Nightingale and were never seen again. Now the wealthy, well-connected camp owner is reopening Nightingale with a staff populated by the prior generation of campers, providing plenty of potential witnesses and suspects. The narrator, Emma Davis, the sole cabinmate of the three vanished girls, returns to Nightingale, supposedly to teach art but also to find closure. Her obsession with images of her lost friends, references she makes to withheld information and her own psychological instability, even the book title itself, all point to one message: Emma's not reliable. As for the final bombshell, more on that later. Emma notes upon her return to Camp Nightingale that "it feels like no time has passed between then and now. That the last decade and a half of my life was nothing but a dream." Unfortunately, she's not alone in that feeling. Emma is meant to be a 28-year-old rising star in the Manhattan art world, but we know little about her other than the traumatic event that occurred when she was 13. When she meets the three girls half her age she's (implausibly) bunked-up with, her voice is "meek, almost apologetic," because we are told that she has spent the interim years with "shy, nerdy" boys who "can break your heart and betray you, but not in the same stinging way girls can." While Sager attempts to explore the intense dynamics within adolescent female friendships, an overly large cast of thinly sketched characters undermines the effort, and genre fans searching for more than the requisite ingredients of a solid thriller may find themselves unsatisfied. The book's most vibrant exchanges take place in the past, between younger Emma and Vivian, the Queen Bee of Nightingale, who seduced Emma as only a wiser, more sophisticated girl could. Was Vivian genuinely looking out for Emma, or searching for a mouse to bat around for a summer? Or both? Does it matter, so long as Emma was hooked? Compared to the piercing Vivian-Emma relationship, however, the rest of the female campers feel extraneous. Indeed, sometimes the only way to keep track of the many characters is by relying on the stereotypes employed to introduce them in rapid succession. Allison would have turned out to be "cute and petite like her mother," while "Natalie would have remained physically formidable, thanks to sports in college." Among the new generation, Krystal is the comic-loving, teddybear-hugging nerd who is "several pounds heavier" than smart, friendly, bespectacled Sasha. Both of them defer to Miranda - the "alpha female," "hottest in the room," and "thoroughly unimpressed with everything," except perhaps her "taut stomach" and pierced nose. The dialogue - overly earnest with the exception of some notquite-timely slang and plenty of mean-girl fat-shaming - doesn't lend a hand to the characterization. But like "The Last Time 1 Lied," this review saves the best for last. With each partial reveal - even when we're led to believe that we know everything Emma knows - Sager hints that there's more to come. And in the end, the author delivers the kind of unpredictable conclusion that all thriller readers crave - utterly shocking yet craftily foreshadowed. For some readers, though, these might be the only pages that linger. ? ALAFAIR burke is the author, most recently, of "The Wife."

The pseudonymous Sager follows his well-received debut, 2017's Final Girls, with another gripping thriller. Tragedy strikes Camp Nightingale in Upstate New York when three girls vanish from their cabin in the middle of the night, leaving their younger roommate, Emma Davis, behind. Fifteen years later, Emma-an artist who constantly relives their disappearance through her paintings-is determined to uncover the mystery of her friends' fate. When Camp Nightingale reopens for the first time since that summer, she returns as an instructor and is haunted by the past and possibly something even more sinister. Suspicion abounds as Emma's memories of that summer lead her to hidden clues left behind in the wake of the girls' disappearance. Sager intricately interweaves the past and present as Emma investigates further, realizing that not everyone she once knew can be trusted. A major twist toward the end compensates for the triteness of one of the big reveals. Sager remains a writer to watch. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she's offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She's ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It's so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel's setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it's hard to believe that the camp's owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelationswhen they comeare hardly worth the wait. And it's hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma's first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn't be amply prepared for her first period, but that's what Sager wants readers to think. There's a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80snot so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.Sophomore slump. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Haunted by memories of fellow campers who went missing 15 years before, Emma Davis is now a successful artist thriving in New York City. Her paintings channel the mysterious events of that harrowing summer at Camp Nightingale, which to this date have never been solved. When Emma serendipitously gets the opportunity to return to Nightingale as an arts teacher and counselor, she reluctantly accepts in hopes that she can uncover the truth of the missing girls. Chapters alternate between the present and 15 years earlier, all told from the perspective of Emma, who reveals herself as an unreliable narrator making readers wary of what to believe. Atmospheric and foreboding, the story unfolds much like an on-screen thriller filled with nods to the horror genre. Verdict Reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this tension-building sophomore release from Sager (Final Girls) offers dizzying twists and makes for a fun summer read. Recommended for mystery, psychological fiction, and thriller fans. [See Prepub Alert, 2/1/18.]-Carolann Curry, Mercer Univ. Lib., Macon, GA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* The summer that Emma Davis spent at Camp Nightingale began like a dream come true but ended in tragedy when her cabin-mates, Vivian, Natalie, and Allison, disappeared. Distraught, Emma accused Nightingale's owner's son of harming the girls, and the camp closed under a cloud of suspicion. Now an up-and-coming artist in New York, Emma is haunted by both the disappearances and guilt over her accusation; she's unable to paint anything other than the missing girls covered in tangled forest-scapes and is tortured by hallucinations of Vivian. When Franny Harris-White, Camp Nightingale's owner, asks her to return as the art instructor for the camp's reopening, Emma agrees, determined to finally uncover what happened to her friends. Her return to the camp brings back the past in full force: Emma is assigned to her old cabin with three girls painfully reminiscent of her friends; her sightings of Vivian intensify; and everyone, from the Harris-Whites to the camp's staff, views her with suspicion. Through the lens of Emma's growing paranoia, whispered campfire tales of the massacre buried in Camp Nightingale's past gain horrifying significance. Sager's second thriller is as tense and twisty as his best-selling Final Girls (2017), but this one is even more polished, with gut-wrenching plot surprises skillfully camouflaged by Emma's paranoia and confusion, the increasingly creepy setting, and a cast of intriguingly secretive characters.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist