Book Review: First Lie Wins

Spoilers! I really hope you go into this book blind. Even avoid the synopsis!

The first lie wins because if the mark is bought in at that point, the sunk cost fallacy sets in and they don’t want to turn back and admit they were a mark all along. Unfortunately, that portends very bad things for individual marks and, if I was making a political point, bad things for the United States. Alas, I’m fortunately here to make a point about Ashley Elston’s first foray into adult thrillers (after six young adult books), 2024’s First Lie Wins, and it’s a doozie! I love, love when I read a modern thriller I can’t predict the story beats, and indeed, I’m wrong when I make predictions. It’s the best feeling when an author outwits me, and Elston did that time and again in her unexpected, thrilling novel.

I call Elston’s book, First Lie Wins, unexpected because — and keep in mind, I go into nearly every book blind having not read the synopsis — I was pleasantly surprised by how different this book was than I anticipated going in. I expected it to be a romantic thriller of some sort, a mystery caper with love and murder, but it’s so much more than that. After reading the book and now reading the synopsis, I would have known the tenor of the book. Point in my favor for avoiding the synopsis I suppose, but the point (heh) stands that as I was diving into Elston’s book, I was surprised by how much she appeared to be giving away upfront while concealing so many secrets up her sleeve like the best authors, aka magicians.

Evie is with Ryan, who has a lot of friends and inherited a well-to-do business in Louisiana. These friends want to make sure Evie is on the up-and-up. Evie, however, as we learn fairly quickly, is on a “job” and Ryan is the “mark” for an unknown client. Presumably, the client wants to take over the shadier, illicit side of Ryan’s business affairs. Evie, real name Lucca from a small town in North Carolina, has been a thief all her life — more in the style of Robin Hood than a hardened criminal, it must be said. She steals from the rich to fund her mother’s cancer treatments. Then, her mother dies, and Lucca stays in that line of work (thieving) for an unknown Mr. Smith. He hooks her up with jobs — clients who seek Mr. Smith out to acquire something from the marks — all over the country and she completes those jobs. Even if the relationship between Lucca and Mr. Smith seems fraught from the beginning, she persists in doing jobs. As we explore her present-day life with Ryan, Elston’s book takes us back to those prior jobs, slowly unraveling the mystery at the heart of the book. The only job that even hints at being beyond the bounds of the Robin Hood caricature is when it appears Evie murdered a woman named Amy in Atlanta, but that’s toward the end of the book.

It surprised me that Ryan himself was shady, a hardened businessman readily willing to threaten others to maintain his illicit business, rather than being an oblivious mark, but while it took me a second to warm up to it, I ultimately liked Elston’s choice there. As one character would tell Lucca later, you’re both morally gray, so why not lean into it and each other for the sake of love?!

The biggest red herring of the book was Lucca’s longtime computer hacker/IT expert, Devon, who follows her from job to job (unbeknownst to Mr. Smith) and helps her. I thought he was Mr. Smith. After all, just like Mr. Smith, Devon communicates through ambiguous comments left on the internet and I figured Mr. Smith had to be someone close to Lucca. Instead, Mr. Smith turned out to be Gregory, the courier of “Mr. Smith’s” missives. Ever since a job Mr. Smith orchestrated to pit his “assets” against each other, Lucca, Devon, and another asset named … Amy (!) have been working together to learn the true identity of Mr. Smith, implicate him so another criminal mastermind takes him out, and thus, extricate themselves from Mr. Smith’s control. They do just that in a rather genius way designed by Elston that also exonerates Lucca of murdering Amy since she, Devon, and Amy orchestrated it to fake Amy’s death and further ensnare Mr. Smith.

I honestly cannot say enough good things about Elston’s debut adult book! I know I had to do spoilers to talk about the book in the way I wanted to, but what a delightful read it was to be left guessing after every turn. And yes, Lucca, now going by Evie, returns to Ryan, they spill their secrets, they seem like they will live happily ever after, and not surprisingly, Evie can’t resist more Robin Hoodesque jobs, so, she takes on the mantle of “Miss Smith.” Let’s go!