🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Never Lie yet, go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
There is something about a Freida McFadden book that just grabs you by the collar and refuses to let you think about anything else until you’re done. Never Lie is no exception. Two unreliable narrators, a house full of secrets, cassette tapes from therapy sessions that were never supposed to be found, and an ending that makes you rethink everything you thought you understood about who these people were. I had my suspicions throughout but I did not have the full picture. That is how it should be.
The Full Summary — Spoilers Included
A House in a Blizzard
Tricia and Ethan are newlyweds, married after only nine months together, driving two hours through a snowstorm to look at a house on Cedar Lane they’re thinking of buying. When they finally get there, something is immediately off. There’s a light on upstairs but no realtor’s car in the driveway. No cell signal. They find a hidden key, let themselves in, and discover that while the house is clearly supposed to have been empty for years, the bologna in the fridge has another week before it expires and there is a cup by the sink still dripping with condensation. Somebody was just here.
On the mantel is a large portrait of a woman. Dr. Adrienne Hale, a psychiatrist who disappeared three years ago, presumed dead, body never found. While Tricia is wandering through the house trying to figure out what on earth they’ve walked into, she finds it: a secret room hidden behind a bookshelf, lined entirely with cassette tapes. Hundreds of them. Every therapy session Adrienne ever recorded, organized and labeled.
And Tricia, for reasons she doesn’t fully explain to Ethan, decides she needs to listen to them.
Who Was Dr. Adrienne Hale
The flashback chapters take us into Adrienne’s perspective starting some time before her disappearance. She’s brilliant, successful, and quietly ruthless in ways that take a while to fully register. She fires her literary agent Paige in the opening pages; she’s writing a follow-up book sharing patient case studies and Paige has become a problem. She records every session she ever conducts, with or without consent, because she is not going to let a legal formality stop her from doing her job the way she wants to do it. She volunteers at a free clinic in the city, which is where she meets Luke, charming and easygoing and carrying a very specific past he doesn’t mention up front.
The Problem Patient
EJ is Adrienne’s most difficult patient. His mother Susan has been paying for his sessions, but when Susan decides the sessions aren’t helping and stops writing the checks, Adrienne uses it as the opening she needed to terminate him. He’s been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and she simply cannot stand him. He does not receive this news well.
Then he shows up at her door with a video he recorded of her in a parking lot, stabbing the tire of the man who stole her spot at the free clinic. She was furious that day. She reacted badly. Now EJ has leverage. He uses it to get himself back into sessions, and once he’s back on her couch, he starts pushing further: two to three sessions a week instead of one, oxycodone prescriptions for so-called knee pain that she knows is not knee pain. She could lose her license. She gives in anyway, because the alternative is that video going public, and she keeps giving in because EJ keeps escalating.
He hints, more than once, that his parents are going to die eventually and when they do he’ll inherit everything, so why bother getting a job? And then in one session he floats the idea that things can happen to vehicles when they’re not well maintained. His mother’s brakes, for instance. Could fail. Adrienne looks at him and asks, are you telling me you’re going to cut your mother’s brakes? He backtracks. But she already knows exactly what he just told her.
Luke and What He Did for Her
Luke had been doing so well. Installing her security system, finding excuses to show up at the clinic every time she was scheduled to be there, eventually becoming something she didn’t expect, someone she actually let in. He’d been a hacker earlier in his life, got caught, and went straight. When Adrienne finally breaks down and tells him about EJ and the blackmail video, Luke begrudgingly agrees that he can get into EJ’s electronics and delete it. He just needs access to the apartment. She gets him the keys, drugs EJ’s champagne at his next appointment, and while EJ is unconscious they delete the video.
When EJ wakes up, he texts Adrienne that he is going to kill her.
Then his parents die in a car accident. He walks into Adrienne’s office and tells her he’s not interested in money anymore. He has his inheritance. What he wants now is her, on his terms. She tells him she doesn’t care about the video anymore. He pulls out his phone and tells her it’s not just about her now. He also has footage of Luke breaking into his apartment. He also still has the recording of Adrienne.
The Tape That Changes Everything
Tricia pulls a tape labeled P.L., Session 2, and starts listening. It’s a woman talking about running from a cabin in the middle of the night, waking up to screaming, watching her fiancé and two friends get killed, being the only survivor. The story is horrific and the details are vivid and credible.
But the final P.L. tape is something else entirely.
Adrienne confronts her directly. She tells her she knows. She knows P.L. killed her fiancé and her two friends. She knows P.L. stabbed herself to make it look like she’d been attacked too. She knows, because Adrienne can spot a liar from a mile away. P.L.’s fiancé had been cheating on her with her best friend Alexis and was planning to break up with P.L. for her. P.L. found those texts. And she could not let it stand.
So she killed her friend Megan first, because Megan was the weakest link. She made sure her fiancé knew exactly why it was happening. And then she sat by Alexis’s bed and watched her bleed out slowly, because that was what Alexis deserved.
Adrienne sits across from a confessed triple murderer and does not call the police. Instead, she tells her she has a problem of her own that needs handling. A problem named EJ.
Adrienne’s Plan
Adrienne tells P.L. everything she knows about EJ from his sessions, his fantasies, what he wants, what would get his guard down. She tells her exactly how to approach him at a bar, what to say, how to use that information. P.L. follows the instructions exactly. She finds EJ, never gives her name, drugs his drink, and brings him back to Adrienne’s house. Adrienne locks P.L. out of the office. Goes back to EJ. Tells him she’s reconsidered and that she would actually like to spend some time with him. Luke has already broken up with her over the whole situation. She has nothing left to lose.
And then she puts EJ into the secret compartment under the couch and closes it.
Goodbye, Edward. (Yes, Edward. The main point of the initials is to make you think EJ was Ethan — Tricia’s husband.)
What’s Happening in the House Right Now
The body Tricia and Ethan find under the couch is EJ. And the man hiding in the attic, the one responsible for that crash in the middle of the night, is Luke. He was supposed to meet Adrienne the night she disappeared and she never showed up. He’s been in the house, sleeping in a bag with no dust on it while everything else in the attic is coated with years of it. He just couldn’t stay away.
Ethan finds the tape room and immediately starts burning tapes labeled GW. Gail W. was a paranoid patient who believed her son was trying to kill her and who talked freely to whoever she crossed paths with in waiting rooms. Gail talked to Patricia. Patricia learned through Gail about Ethan’s mother having a terrible fall down the stairs and put it together. Ethan needed money. His mother was screaming at him about what a failure he was. And he snapped. Patricia understood exactly what that meant.
She engineered their meeting. Because she wanted someone who understood her.
That’s how we get to the first twist: EJ is Edward, not Ethan. The book works very hard to make you think they might be the same person. They are not.
The second twist: Tricia is P.L. (Pa-Tricia.) The woman on the tapes. The one Adrienne confronted and chose not to turn in. The one who killed her fiancé and her friends and got away with it, who then helped Adrienne dispose of a blackmailer, who then tracked down a man she’d deduced was also a killer and married him on purpose.
They sit in Adrienne Hale’s house and confess everything to each other. And Ethan says: that Luke guy is going to be a problem. They need to take care of him.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Two of them. The EJ/Ethan James misdirect is effective because the book lets you build the assumption slowly rather than pointing at it, and the Tricia-is-PL reveal clicks into place in that final confrontation session between Adrienne and her patient in a way that catches you completely off guard. Freida McFadden is very good at hiding things in plain sight, and this one is a great example of what that looks like when it’s done right.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied, and the ending is what makes the whole thing worth it. Two years later, they have a daughter, Patricia is pregnant again, and they bought the house. They kept Adrienne’s furniture. Luke is buried in the garden, Ethan killed him. Edward is buried a few feet away. And they are just living there, in a dead woman’s house, on top of two bodies, raising a family. You spend most of this book assuming Luke is going to make it out okay because he seems like the decent one. He does not come out okay. There is something I really appreciate about a book that refuses to hand you the ending you assumed you were heading toward.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
Steam Rating: 🔥🔥Fade to black.
- Sex? Yes
- Open or closed door? Closed door
- Descriptive? No
- How much? Adrienne and Luke have a relationship but it stays firmly in the background — this is a thriller first, and the romance is barely a blip compared to everything else going on. Same with Tricia and Ethan.
Would I Relisten?
Maybe. The twists are so well constructed on first read that knowing them would completely change the experience, but I could see going back just to catch everything I missed the first time around.
Who Is This For
If you love psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators, morally absent protagonists, and endings that make your jaw drop, this is the read for you. It’s also a solid starting point if you’re new to Freida McFadden, or a must-read if you’re already a fan. If you need your main characters to be sympathetic people making good choices, this is not your book.
Where to Get This Book
📚 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
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📱 Ebook
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Psychological Thriller | Standalone | Steam: 🔥🔥
Questions
- Who killed Adrienne? Tricia did, afraid Adrienne would reveal their secret about EJ. She left the body down a road a few hours away.
- Who’s the killer, and what’s the twist? Tricia is the patient “PL,” Patricia Lawton. She wasn’t a survivor of the cabin attack. She killed her fiancé and two best friends after finding out he was cheating with one of them.
- Who is EJ? Is Ethan EJ? No. EJ is Edward Jamison, a patient who blackmailed Adrienne. Adrienne made Tricia help kill him, and his is the body under the office floor.
- Who is Ethan? He’s the son of Gail Wiley, the “GW” on the tapes, and he pushed her down the stairs for the insurance money. Tricia knew about it from Adrienne and set up their first meeting on purpose.
- Who is in the house? Luke, Adrienne’s boyfriend, has been secretly staying there. Because he had no where else to do after the media branded his a killer.
- What happened to Luke? Ethan slit his throat while Tricia watched, and they buried him and EJ on the property.
- How does it end? Tricia and Ethan buy the house and raise their baby there, with the bodies buried on the grounds. Tricia is ready to kill Ethan if he ever turns on her.
- Why did Tricia act like she’d never seen the house? She’s an unreliable narrator. She came back to move EJ’s body before the house sold, but didn’t know where it was hidden.
- How did Tricia kill Adrienne? The book doesn’t say.