Audiobook Review:

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

Read By Saskia Maarleveld

Published: January 2024

Summary from Goodreads:

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job isn’t like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge….

Confession:

This was the perfect thriller to start the year with. It was fast paced, had great morally gray characters and the narrator had a great voice that really brought the characters to life. No one in this story is who they seem to be and it was a lot of fun figuring out what was really going on.

Saskia Maarleveld did a great job bringing the characters in this story to life. I loved her voice and she does a good job with varying her tones and accents for the other characters.

I really liked Evie. She is very smart and if her lot in life had been better she might have done well with any career she chose. That she got caught up in the web of Mr Smith’s world and was able to survive in it shows just how determined and clever she is. I also appreciated that she was clever enough to realize that she couldn’t do her job without help and finding Devon, her secret weapon, was perhaps her most brilliant idea. I really liked him and would have loved to see more of him. Her relationship with her mark, Ryan, was actually kind of sweet, and I loved how their feelings for each other changed over the course of the book.

The plot of this story was great. There were lots of twists, no one was who they seemed to be and there were lots of mind games going on. There were even several different plots going on, some you are not even aware of until later in the story. I also really liked how we learn about Evie’s past. There are flashback chapters that show Evie as a young adult and how she was recruited by Mr Smith and then some of her jobs that led up to her present one. The big twist at the end was also well done and a bit of a surprise.

I guess this book had a lot of hype around it when it first came out, but I somehow missed it. I am very glad I found it now though, as the author has a new thriller that just came out which I am very eager to read. I highly recommend this one if you are looking for a fast paced thriller where no one is telling the truth.