🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.3/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read First Lie Wins yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Meet Evie Porter. Perfect Southern boyfriend, she just moved into a beautiful house with a white picket fence, a garden, and she has a lovely social circle. She’s exactly the kind of woman you’d trust immediately at a dinner party.
The only problem is that Evie Porter doesn’t exist.
This book is a puzzle. Not in the frustrating way where you feel like you’re being kept in the dark just to string you along, but in the satisfying way where every piece arrives exactly when it needs to, and by the time the full picture forms, you want to go back and reread everything you missed.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Who Is Evie Porter?
Her real name is Lucca Moreno, and she’s been working for a man she knows only as Mr. Smith for years. The setup is always the same: she is given a name, a location, a mark. She learns everything about the town, the people, the history. She builds a life that looks exactly right. Then she does the job.
The current mark is Ryan Sumner. The current alias is Evie Porter.
Job details come through a PO box. She gets the bare minimum she needs and nothing more. She doesn’t know Mr. Smith’s real identity. She doesn’t ask. She just does what she’s told.
She does have one person in her corner: Devin. Years ago she decided she needed someone to back her up — independent of Mr. Smith and his organization. That’s when she found Devin. He handles logistics, backs her up from the outside, and has pulled her out of more than one impossible situation. He’s the person she calls when things go sideways. He matters a lot in this book, and you’ll see why.
Ryan, for his part, is not exactly squeaky clean either. He’s a black market dealer who buys through questionable channels and resells at a significant markup, with a particular tendency to disappear on Thursday appointments. He has no idea who Evie actually is. What he does know is that he’s falling for her, and Evie, for the first time in a very long time, is letting someone get close.
The Aliases
One of the things this book does brilliantly is its structure. Present-day chapters alternate with flashbacks, each one tied to a specific alias and a specific job. They don’t get dumped on you all at once. They surface exactly when they’re relevant, and by the end, every single one of them matters.
Eight years before the present timeline, Evie was caught retrieving a scanner at an event. It was a trap; police were already waiting. A high-ranking policeman intervened, let her go, handed her a phone with a number for Mr. Smith. That’s how she got recruited.
Since then, the jobs:
- Izzy Williams — nanny for the Kingston family. Mission: access the safe and retrieve the USB drive. The wife was a drunk, the husband a workaholic, but she managed to bond with the child. The wife caught her at the safe, went to grab her, tripped, fell, hit her head. Evie couldn’t just leave the kid, even though she was told to, so she called the husband, feigning a family emergency, and got out.
- Mia — Andrew Marshall’s political campaign. Mr. Smith wanted blackmail material to own the future governor. But Andrew was just too squeaky clean. Evie scrapped the original plan given to her and built her own. She walked away with multiple politicians quietly in her debt. Andrew specifically would owe her one for saving him from what Mr. Smith planned.
- Wendy Wallace — high school football coach Mitch Cameron. Objective: remove him from his position with no scandal. She handled it. On the way out, she gave his player Tyrone Nichols some quiet life advice. Tyrone became someone she could trust. That would matter.
- Helen White — a painting owned by Ralph Tait that he refused to sell. Four of Mr. Smith’s other agents had already tried and failed. Evie got it out in broad daylight, swapped in a replica, walked out clean. This is the job where Devin proved exactly what he’s worth. Without him, it doesn’t work.
- Regina Hale — six months before present day. Sent to watch Amy Holder, who had information about the Conley family that Mr. Smith needed. Amy clocked her almost immediately. Things escalated. By the end of it, Amy Holder was officially declared dead.
When Lucca Moreno Shows Up
Present day — Evie and Ryan are out one evening when a woman appears and introduces herself as Lucca Moreno. That’s Evie’s real name. This woman has her backstory, has been to the places Evie’s been. She’s with a man named James who wants to reconnect with Ryan, which Ryan finds strange.
Evie invites them to dinner and sets a quiet trap. She wants to see if fake Lucca will go through her things. She does. Then, standing side by side at the sink doing dishes, Evie leans in and says: “Did you get your next set of instructions yet?”
Completely catches her off guard. Now Evie knows they share an employer, she makes sure “Lucca” knows this too. The following morning, James and fake Lucca are dead in a car crash.
What Evie eventually pieces together is dark. Mr. Smith sent someone under her real name, made sure she was visible and documented everywhere, then had her killed. Lucca Moreno is now officially dead. She can never go back to that identity. Mr. Smith spent eight years building out the Evie Porter identity — licenses, IDs, the whole paper trail — so she’s permanently tied to it. He planned this from the beginning.
The Mr. Smith Problem
Then a warrant shows up. Evie is flagged as a material witness in the death of Amy Holder. She knew Amy but was operating as Regina at the time, so she has to manage this carefully.
Mr. Smith gets in touch. He believes she took something from Amy and stashed it in a safety deposit box. He has photos of her entering a bank. He says: get him what’s in the box, and this all goes away — or the evidence trail gets worse.
Meanwhile she’s trying to figure out if Ryan is connected to Mr. Smith. She’s been passing information about Ryan’s business to him as part of the job, altering it along the way — changing shipment dates and adjusting figures — to protect Ryan’s business while appearing to cooperate. Ryan knows something is being stolen from his operation but hasn’t traced it back to her.
Ryan convinces her to let him come with her on her trip to meet detectives in Atlanta. And then on their way there she overhears Ryan in the hotel hallway. He’s talking to George — her made-up name for the delivery man Mr. Smith sends her, because the first time she saw him he was wearing a UPS uniform with that name on the tag, a go-between between her and Mr. Smith.
She goes cold. She finds the papers George gave Ryan and they’re the originals she left for Mr. Smith. Ryan shouldn’t have these. Unless Ryan is Mr. Smith?
She ditches Ryan at the hotel and tosses her Evie Porter phone, then calls Devin — the one person she feels she can trust. They both arrive at the same conclusion: Ryan must be Mr. Smith.
She visits Mitch Cameron in the present day, riles him up deliberately so he’ll reach out to Mr. Smith after she leaves. Devin calls: the gambit paid off. They know who Mr. Smith really is now — and how he connects with new clients.
She makes it to Atlanta and is able to completely get the cops off her trail. They have photos and videos of her in Amy’s hotel room, setting the fire that night — graciously provided by Mr. Smith to trap her into compliance. She is able to put it all to bed saying the woman in those is Lucca Moreno. Luckily the “new” Lucca looked a lot like her.
She leaves the hotel a free woman and as she is leaving, George corners her. She was supposed to meet him the day before. If she had, she never would have needed to deal with the police. He would have made it all go away. He is determined she is hiding something from him.
She and George go to the bank together. Devin watching from outside. They open the box.
One small origami swan inside.
She looks at George and says: “I guess I don’t need to call you George anymore. Because you are Mr. Smith.” George is Mr. Smith. The man in the UPS uniform, the go-between, the message carrier, has been running her the whole time. Ryan knew him only from previous business transactions. Mr. Smith had used Ryan’s service and as the business grew, so did Mr. Smith’s interest in the business. The night she overheard them talking in the hallway, Ryan was telling George that someone was stealing from his operation. George was the one who tipped Ryan off. Ryan knew someone was stealing from him, but when he sat down and looked at the info, he realised it had all been altered. He needed to know why.
What she had actually done: Never put anything beyond the paper swan in that box. It was always meant as a trap for Mr. Smith, something to make him question her loyalty. But Amy was able to obtain proof that Mr. Smith had been double-crossing and skimming money from all of his clients for years, and delivered it to Victor Connolly and the Conley family the night before. George walks right out of that bank straight into the people he’s been stealing from.
“How long have you been planning to screw me over?”
“Four years. Only half as long as you’ve been planning to screw me over.”
Best Part of This Book
The twists. There are a lot of them, and almost none of them fall where you expect. The alias structure is brilliant. You get to watch the same woman be completely different people across different timelines, and every flashback surfaces exactly when it’s needed to explain something happening in the present. You’re constantly being reoriented in the best way.
The Mr. Smith reveal works because it isn’t arbitrary. George was right there from the beginning. And the reveal that Evie had been altering the documents she passed along, protecting Ryan’s business while appearing to comply, reframes everything you thought you understood about what she was doing and why. I loved it.
And Devin. He is a complete MVP and the book knows it.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 / 5 — No steam here, and the book doesn’t need it. What Evie and Ryan have is real and quietly affecting, but this is a thriller about identity and survival. The tension is all in the trust.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. Very.
Three months after Atlanta, Evie goes back to Ryan. She tells him she’s been pretending for a long time and explains as much as she can. Ryan tells her an associate had warned him someone was stealing from his business and he’d never traced it to Evie. When she points out that the man he talked to in the courtyard that night was her boss/Mr. Smith, Ryan realizes the person who warned him and the person running the whole operation against him are one and the same. He’s furious. He stays anyway.
He goes through the papers George gave him and realizes every single one has been altered. Not real proof of anything. He’d decided to ride it out. Evie explains she was the one who changed them, because she needed Mr. Smith to stop trusting her completely, but she wasn’t willing to let Ryan’s business go down as collateral damage.
They’re finally honest with each other. They’re together.
And even though initially Evie was done with this kind of work… Evie is back to work — with Devin, and with Amy, who is very much alive. The hotel fire was orchestrated: Amy was moved to a different room before Evie set it, with a lookalike body to close the official story. Amy and Evie had figured out years earlier that they were the only two of Mr. Smith’s agents still breathing. He’d been quietly eliminating the rest after the Tait job. Anyone who failed was killed.
They’d been working toward this moment for four years.
The three of them — Evie, Amy, and Devin — have taken over Mr. Smith’s operation entirely. Same message board, same network.
They call her Mrs. Smith now.
Would I Relisten?
Yes. Knowing what you know at the end, a second listen would be a completely different experience — everything you thought you knew reads completely differently. The narrator is a great fit for Evie, steady and controlled, and never overplays the reveals. Exactly what this book needs.
Who Is This For?
If you love con artist stories, morally gray protagonists who are always three steps ahead, and thrillers that reward you for paying attention — this one is built for you. It’s not a romance, it’s not a cozy mystery. It’s sharp, layered, and it takes its twists seriously.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible CA | Audible US | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Thriller | Steam: 🔥
Questions: Who is Mr. Smith? What happened to Lucca Moreno? What happened to Mr. Smith? Is The First Lie Wins worth reading?