The Better Liar: A Novel

The Better Liar: A Novel

by Tanen Jones
The Better Liar: A Novel

The Better Liar: A Novel

by Tanen Jones

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A slow burn with twists from chapter to chapter. Just when you think you have this novel figured out—another surprise occurs. Some families are fun like that.

“Jones’s sensational debut has the bones of a thriller but reads like literary fiction: lean, shrewd, and gratifyingly real.”—Entertainment Weekly

When a woman conceals her sister’s death to claim their joint inheritance, her deception exposes a web of dangerous secrets in this addictive new thriller for fans of Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, and Paula Hawkins. 

An ID Book Club Selection

Leslie Flores has the perfect life—a loving husband, a happy newborn, and a New Mexico home straight out of a magazine. She’s been the perfect daughter, too, taking care of her ailing father in his final days. But Leslie has a dark secret—and it’s an expensive secret to keep. When she discovers she won’t receive a penny of her inheritance unless she finds her estranged sister, Robin, she sets out to track her down. Instead, upon arriving at Robin’s apartment, Leslie discovers her body.

Just as Leslie begins to panic, she meets a charismatic aspiring actress named Mary who bears a striking resemblance to Robin—and has every reason to leave her past behind. The two women make a bargain: Mary will impersonate Robin for a week in exchange for Robin’s half of the cash. Neither realizes how high the stakes will become when Mary takes a dead woman’s name.
 
Even as Mary begins to suspect Leslie is hiding something, and Leslie realizes the stranger living in her house has secrets of her own, Robin’s wild, troubled legacy threatens to eclipse them both. Fans of Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, and Paula Hawkins will relish this darkly addictive portrait of the ties that bind and the secrets we all keep from one another.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781984821249
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 01/14/2020
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 1,044,953
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Tanen Jones grew up in Texas and North Carolina. She has a degree in American history and spent several years editing law and criminal justice textbooks. A queer author, she writes about queer women in dark spaces. Tanen now lives in New York with her partner, where she writes to the sound of her neighbor’s piano. The Better Liar is her debut novel.

Read an Excerpt

1

Leslie

By the time I found her she was dead.

I groped for somewhere to sit down. The only place other than the bed, where the body lay, was a wooden dining-­room chair half-­buried under a pile of wrinkled clothes. It had a cushion hanging off the seat, patterned with cartoon bees, and as I moved to straighten it a cockroach, startled by the movement, hurried up the chair leg. I jerked my hand back and closed my eyes. Then I opened them again—­helplessly.

I didn’t want to look at the body. The body—­Robin—­Rachel. I’d never seen her as an adult, but as a teenager she’d been round-­faced, milk-­fed. Now she was so thin as to be impossible to look at. My vision unfocused itself when it encountered her ribs, visible through both the fabric of her runnin’ rebels T-­shirt and the sheet in which most of her body below the shoulders was tangled. Her hipbones, too, projected, cradling the vacant, starved abdomen.

A little vomit had dried in the corner of her mouth and on her tongue, the color of burned things. She had been unconscious when she’d choked on it.

Iker was panicking. “Should I call the police?” he said, directing his gaze at the close yellow walls, the popcorn ceiling. “I’m really sorry about this, I’m so sorry. I’ll call the police. I’ll call.” He wore a white polo with the logo of the housing company on it. Crescent-­shaped sweat stains gathered underneath his sagging pectoral muscles, like a pair of closed eyes. They twitched as he began digging in the pockets of his khaki pants for his cellphone.

“No,” I said, trying to think fast. “No, I’ll call. You go outside. I just want—­” I swallowed. “I just want to be with her for a minute.”

“Yeah,” Iker said, wiping his upper lip. “Okay. Okay. I’ll wait. Outside. I’ll be . . .” He pointed. “I’ll be right down there if you need me.”

He went down the stairs into the living room below, taking his proprietor’s key but leaving the door ajar. After a minute I could hear him shuffling on the front porch, audible through the mosquito screen on the open window.

She was still on the bed. The fact of her was as sweltering as the room.

In my imagination I reached for my phone. In another version, I didn’t. I lived these two visions simultaneously for several long minutes, my hand twitching in the air above my purse, unable to choose between them.

If I called the police, then Robin would be dead—­absolutely dead. Legally, governmentally dead. I would have to identify her, and arrange somehow to take her body back to Albuquerque to be buried, and have a funeral, and then everyone would know she was dead and it would be over.

I could contest, maybe—­but contesting could take a year or more. I couldn’t wait a year. If I didn’t call the police, then she would still be dead, but—­

I took her wallet off the dresser and looked at her ID. “Rachel Vreeland” stared out at me from the hypersaturated photograph. She’d been pretty as an adult, the pale skin I remembered from childhood turned slightly orange by the sun or the DMV’s printer. 5’-­09”, the text next to her face said. Eyes: BRO.

Her real name wasn’t anywhere in the wallet, or anywhere in the rest of the room. She had a lot of stuff, but most of it was clothes, strewn across the floor and piled in the closet. I picked through the items with pockets, careful of cockroaches, but turned up only old movie tickets and gas-­station receipts. The walls were covered in movie posters and a corkboard with photographs of friends with red Solo cups, a scruffy orange cat, a long-­lost boyfriend from whenever the last time was she was weighty enough to crush to his side while he held the camera out in front of them. The dresser drawers held dozens of bottles of disintegrating nail polish and depleted pans of eye shadow. At least fifty pairs of underwear, which I pushed aside with a clothes hanger, scraping the bottom of the drawer: nothing underneath.

I shook out each of her shoes next—­cowboy boots, Toms, slip-­on sneakers—­turning the left and then the right upside down.

Something fell out of the right one. I’d been expecting Robin’s real ID, or maybe a baggie, so the anticlimax startled me: a pair of pearl earrings, so light that they made barely any noise against the carpeted floor. For a moment I thought they must be insects, moths, alive inside Robin’s shoes, and their brief bouncing trajectory across the floor was translated by my gaze as mad, frenzied flapping; then I blinked, and they resolved into dead objects.

It took me several seconds to realize why I was staring at them. When it came to me I snatched them up so quickly that my fingernails scraped the carpet. My mother’s earrings. Five-­pointed, like stars, each seed grasped by a minuscule gold claw. I hadn’t seen them since I was a little girl. I suppose I thought they’d been buried with her, or my father had sold them. But here they were in Robin’s cramped rented room in Las Vegas.

Had Daddy given them to her and never told me?

He wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t deserve them. I was the one who’d made his doctors’ appointments, helped him swallow, taken him to the movies every Sunday. Robin had done nothing but call occasionally, after she turned sixteen and disappeared.

He hadn’t given them to her. Probably she’d stolen them the night she left. She’d taken forty dollars out of my purse that night too.

I rubbed my thumb along the surface of the pearls, feeling several faint scratches on the curvature of one of the seeds, invisible to the eye but evident to the touch. Pearls were easily scratched. My grandmother had taught us to polish her pearl jewelry with olive oil and a chamois cloth, pushing our cloth-­covered fingernails into the crevices where each pearl was secured. But Robin was careless.

I closed my fingers around the earrings. The backings dug into my palm like children’s teeth. If I didn’t call the police, Robin Voigt could stay Rachel Vreeland. Rachel Vreeland could have a crappy City of Las Vegas burial, a heroin addict with no family, the person she had chosen to be when she was sixteen. It gave me a thick, sick pleasure to think about. I wanted her to be alone in the ground.

But it wouldn’t matter. Either way, I couldn’t get what I needed from her.

She would have loved that.

I had been in the room with her body for almost five minutes now. The pacing on the porch had stopped; Iker was considering whether to come back upstairs for me.

There was a series of faint rusty creaks as someone else came up the second set of stairs, which clung to the siding on the rear of the house, allowing access to the upper floor from the backyard. Whoever had come in went into the second bedroom and slammed the door.

Her roommate. Yes. Iker had said there was another tenant.

I heard the muffled noises of quick movement from the second bedroom. The roommate could come into the hall at any moment and see me—­see Robin’s body—­wonder where the police were, who I was, why Iker hadn’t called—­

The front door opened into the house, and Iker’s voice came floating up the inner stairs. “Miss, um . . . Leslie? Did you . . . Leslie . . . ?”

I didn’t reach for my phone. I slipped the earrings into my purse and walked quickly toward the back door. I was out before anyone saw me, making as little sound as I could manage on the metal stairs.

At the noise of the ignition, Iker ran back out onto the front porch, waving his arm at me to stop. He shouted something after me, something I couldn’t hear as I drove away.

Reading Group Guide

In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important plot details. If you have not finished reading The Better Liar, we suggest that you wait before reviewing this guide.

1. What were your first impressions of the two main characters, Leslie and Mary? Did they turn out to be accurate in any way?

2. Robin narrates episodes of her and Leslie's childhood throughout much of the book. Why do you think Robin chooses to communicate directly with the reader in this way?

3. What do you think of Leslie and Dave's relationship? What secrets are they keeping from each other? Do you think Dave is a good husband and Leslie a good wife? What does it mean to be a good wife? Do you think Leslie's fear that Dave will leave her is based in fact? What do you think drives this fear?

4. Through Robin's and Leslie's memories, we see glimpses of their mother, whose life and death comes into greater focus over the course of the book. Did you see any parallels between Christine's life and that of the two sisters?

5. Leslie and Robin often remember or interpret the same event in very different ways. For example, Leslie's initial recollection is that Robin pushed her away after their mother's death, whereas Robin recounts a memory of Leslie forcing her to sleep in the guest bedroom the night of their mother's funeral. Have you ever recalled an event completely differently than another family member did? Why do you think this phenomenon occurs?

6. Many of Leslie's actions are driven by shame. What do you think of shame surrounding motherhood and mental illness? What could be done to lessen it?

7. Leslie and Robin’s father was often absent and their mother was not reliable, which meant that much of Robin’s care fell to Leslie. How do you think Leslie's later feelings about motherhood might have been affected by her "parentification" at a young age? How do you think Robin was affected by being parented primarily by a sibling?

8. Nancy plays a classic noir role in this book—that of the corrupt police officer who begins sleeping with the femme fatale. What do you think of this relationship? Can a relationship built on a lie ever be a healthy one?

9. When Leslie expresses frustration with their mother's depression when Robin is eight, Robin "fixes" the situation by murdering their mother. We can see at novel’s start that Robin has not moved beyond this problem-solving method, choosing to allow her ex-boyfriend's girlfriend Rachel to die in order to show him the error of his ways. Confronted with Leslie's problem, Robin suggests that an easy solution would have been to kill Eli. But at the end of the novel, instead of killing someone, Robin decides to force Leslie into psychiatric care. Do you think this represents a kind of growth on Robin's part? Why do you think she makes this choice?

10. What do you imagine happened to each of the characters after the novel’s end? What do you imagine happened to Leslie? What about Nancy? Do you think Robin would make it in Hollywood? Do you think the sisters ever spoke again?

11. Did you have a favorite character? If so, who was it and why did you like them?

12. What about The Better Liar surprised you most? Did you identify with any of the characters? If so, why?

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