Ed James: Tell Me Lies
This review is written with thanks to the TBC Audible Listeners' Group and Bookouture for my copy of Tell Me Lies.
FBI special agent Max Carter is on the hunt – he'll stop at nothing to catch a kidnapper with a taste for danger and a need for revenge. Fans of Lee Child and David Baldacci will be gripped by this heart-racing thriller from bestselling author Ed James.
As Senator Christopher Holliday walks through the halls of the US Federal Building in Seattle, his phone beeps with an alert. Frustrated by the interruption, he takes a quick glance and is horrified by the image on the screen – his two children, Brandon and Avery, unconscious. The message simply reads: Meet me or they die.
The race is on to find the children and leading the investigation is Special Agent Max Carter from the FBI's Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team. He will stop at nothing to find children stolen from their families – after all, he was once one of those taken children, so he knows exactly what's at stake.
Rushing to the Senator's home in Washington State, Carter faces a wall of police cruisers and blacked-out SUVs. Megan Holliday, the senator's wife, was ambushed by a man with a gun as she returned home from taking her kids out for ice cream. Bound and drugged, the attacker left her unconscious on the doorstep before messaging her husband.
When Senator Holliday flees the federal building, but fails to show up at home, Carter grows suspicious. The busy politician has vanished without telling anyone what he's up to. If Carter knows one thing, it's that Holliday has something to hide. And he just became Carter's prime suspect.
I always enjoy a new series and Tell Me Lies was no different. I quickly became engaged in the plot and wanted to know what had happened to the children.
In Tell Me Lies we are introduced to Max Carter. Although the details of the case he was investigating seemed to be more prevalent than details about his character, I could see that he is a family man who cares deeply for his wife and daughter and this influences his actions on this case. There is definitely more to come from him and I look forward to seeing how the character develops.
James has engineered a complex plot in this novel and I was interested to see how it would all come together. There are sections of the novel that are set a few years previously and at first I found it difficult to see how this was related to the plot in the present However, when everything is revealed, I found myself hooked in an investigation which is very relevant to events in the news at the moment and gave me lots of food for thought.
Jared Hendrickson narrates the audio version and whilst it took me some time to get used to his accent, I did find the narration easy to listen to whilst still conveying the tension in the novel.
Tell Me Lies is available from Audible.
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