Liz's Reviews > What Lies in the Woods

3.5 stars, rounded down
What Lies in the Woods is a psychological thriller about three young women dealing with the repercussions of an episode from their youth. When they were eleven, Naomi, Cass and Liv spent the summer in the woods. One day, Naomi is attacked and left for dead. Luckily, she survives. She and her friends identify her attacker. But it turns out, they were liars.
When the man dies in prison twenty years later, Liv decides she needs to tell the truth.
All three of the women are damaged goods, as one would expect. I don’t expect to necessarily like unreliable characters, but I need to find them interesting. These gals didn’t elicit any response and felt too much like cliches. I couldn’t buy one of the main premises of the story, why they didn’t tell the adults about Persephone.
But the story was engaging enough that I wanted to see how it would play out. There were numerous individuals that could be behind the attack on Naomi. In fact, my opinion on who was behind the crime changed several times. There are multiple twists here. Some were obvious from miles away while others caught me off guard. And the pace does pick up as the story goes on.
I prefer my stories to be believable, which is why I seem to have a love/hate relationship with psychological thrillers. This veered too close to the unbelievable side. But it passed the entertainment requirement.
I have a problem with narrators with breathy voices. So I wasn’t a big fan of Karissa Vacker. But she does a good job of differentiating the various voices.
My thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for an advance copy of this book.