Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Minotaur Books for sending me a review copy of All the Best Lies by Joanna Schaffhausen.

This is the third book in the Ellery Hathaway series but I felt it worked pretty well as a stand-alone book. The author caught me up on the previous relationships and history so I didn’t feel like I was missing anything crucial.

Reed Markham is an FBI agent with one pretty big unsolved case on his mind. Who murdered his mother 40 years ago? He heads back to Vegas to try and piece the clues together, bringing Ellery Hathaway (suspended police officer) along for a fresh set of eyes and some moral support.

At just over 300 pages I thought the story was well-paced and kept me engaged and eager to find out who the killer was. The characters were also really interesting, and I’m looking forward to reading the first two books and learning more about them.

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Synopsis:

FBI agent Reed Markham is haunted by one painful unsolved mystery: who murdered his mother? Camilla was brutally stabbed to death more than forty years ago while baby Reed lay in his crib mere steps away. The trail went so cold that the Las Vegas Police Department has given up hope of solving the case. But then a shattering family secret changes everything Reed knows about his origins, his murdered mother, and his powerful adoptive father, state senator Angus Markham. Now Reed has to wonder if his mother's killer is uncomfortably close to home.

Unable to trust his family with the details of his personal investigation, Reed enlists his friend, suspended cop Ellery Hathaway, to join his quest in Vegas. Ellery has experience with both troubled families and diabolical murderers, having narrowly escaped from each of them. She's eager to skip town, too, because her own father, who abandoned her years ago, is suddenly desperate to get back in contact. He also has a secret that could change her life forever, if Ellery will let him close enough to hear it.

Far from home and relying only on each other, Reed and Ellery discover young Camilla had snared the attention of dangerous men, any of whom might have wanted to shut her up for good. They start tracing his twisted family history, knowing the path leads back to a vicious killer—one who has been hiding in plain sight for forty years and isn't about to give up now.