After a betrayal that sent their marriage into freefall, Hannah and Sam are desperate for a fresh start with their eight-year-old daughter Lily—and where better than picture-perfect Owl Cottage in beautiful Cornwall. But something about the holiday home stirs dark memories for Hannah…

When she finds dead creatures on the doorstep and hears mysterious knocks at the door, Hannah can’t help wondering whether someone is messing with her—or whether the past she’s been running from has finally claimed her sanity.

As the disturbing events at Owl Cottage seep out into the local community and the police become involved, Hannah turns to Sam for help, but when he dismisses her worries, she wonders if she was wrong to ever trust him. Are the memories making her paranoid, or is this something more sinister than she dares imagine?

Tell Me Lies is a suspenseful, psychological, dark thriller by author Teresa Driscoll. I haven’t read her work before but the blurb sounded interesting and I love a good thriller so I eagerly jumped in.

The book opens with couple Hannah and Sam and their daughter Lily heading to a cottage in Cornwall for a well-earned break and to hopefully work out if they can save their marriage. The plot is told from mainly Hannah’s POV and it moves around a lot in time from the ‘now’ at the cottage and by how many days they have been there to ‘before’.

Without giving too much away Hannah starts to experience things at the cottage that make her wonder if they are in her head or if someone is messing with her. She also starts to recall being at the cottage before and what happened when she was a child.

Whilst I did enjoy the read and the twisty plot which left me feeling uneasy at times, it was also quite a slow read and there were pages when I felt nothing much happened. However, it did have short chapters, which I love, and a great cast of believable characters and realistic situations. Plus, it was set in idyllic Cornwall.

Overall, if you are looking for a book that will hook you from the beginning, have you trying to work out alongside Hannah whether everything is in her head or not, and keep you on your toes, this is the book to pick up.

For more than twenty-five years as a journalist―including fifteen years as a BBC TV news presenter―Teresa Driscoll followed stories into the shadows of life. Covering crime for so long, she watched and was deeply moved by all the ripples each case caused, and the haunting impact on the families, friends and witnesses involved. It is those ripples that she explores in her darker fiction.

Teresa’s novels have sold more than two million copies and have been published in twenty languages. She lives in beautiful Devon with her family.