The Liar’s Girl

Catherine Ryan Howard

Feb 2018 · Blackstone Publishing

About this ebook

2019 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel

Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin’s elite St. John’s College—and Ireland’s most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his five young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just nineteen, Will is locked away in the city’s Central Psychiatric Hospital.

Freshman Alison Smith moved to the Big Smoke to enroll in St. John’s and soon fell hard for Will Hurley. Her world bloomed ... and then imploded when Liz, her best friend, became the latest victim of the Canal Killer—and the Canal Killer turned out to be the boy who’d been sleeping in her bed. Alison fled to the Netherlands and, in ten years, has never once looked back.

When a young woman’s body is found in the Grand Canal, Garda detectives visit Will to see if he can assist them in solving what looks like a copycat killing. Instead, Will tells them he has something new to confess—but there’s only one person he’s prepared to confess it to.

The last thing Alison wants is to be pulled back into the past she’s worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, she returns to the city she hasn’t set foot in for more than a decade to face the man who murdered the woman she was supposed to become.

Only to discover that, until now, Will has left out the worst part of all ...

Ratings and reviews

After reading the blurb for this one, I was hoping for an edge of your seat thriller, but to say that the story moves at a snail's pace is an understatement. As if that weren't enough, the switches from past to present and back again, as well as those moving from Alison to the killer were abrupt enough to be distracting. Other than a couple of mildly creepy scenes with the killer, there's little in the way of action until the end when we do get a couple of pages of what I would consider gripping and fast-paced. By that time, we have our big reveal on the killer's identity, and while they weren't completely new to the story, they were darn close. Enough so that it was next to impossible to make an accurate guess, which is one of the things that draws me to a mystery/thriller. In my opinion, the best part of the whole book was the last couple of pages where we do get an interesting twist in the story, but since that twist is only revealed to the reader, it has zero impact on anything else that's happened. In the end, this was a disappointing story with an even more disappointing conclusion.

Excellent whodunit! I loved the twist at the end. Every character well-fleshed out and detailed descriptions of locations. A page-turner!

About the author

Catherine Ryan Howard is an internationally bestselling crime writer from Cork, Ireland. Her novel 56 Days was named a best thriller of 2021 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Irish Times; was her second Irish number one bestseller; and won Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Her previous work has been shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best Novel and the CWA’s John Creasey New Blood and Ian Fleming Steel Daggers, and she’s been shortlisted for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year multiple times. Her work has been published in seventeen languages, and a number of her novels have been optioned for screen. She lives in Dublin, where she currently divides her time between the desk and the couch.