Book Review – Lies Like Poison by Chelsea Pitcher
Raven, Poppy, Lily and Belladonna were best friends, once. They would’ve done anything for each other. Even murder…
So Raven’s friends make a vow – to brew a lethal tea to get rid of his wicked stepmother once and for all. But when someone gets cold feet, the plan is off.
Three years later, Raven’s stepmother is found dead. Only belladonna is found in her tea…
Someone is lying.
Someone committed murder.
But who…?
My rating:
I received this book from the publisher via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
I’m not sure this book is what I expected but I ended up enjoying it! At first I think I was expecting a little more straight up murder mystery, maybe with a little friendship stuff. And it’s more the other way round!
While this was confusing at first, I think it made a better book overall – especially in the second half. The first has two much of the author trying to use past secrets to confuse you, but then tells you about them soon after! That works better if they last longer.
Aside from that though, the secrets, trust and friendships here are pretty well done. It is a little frustrating when they don’t trust each other, but you can sort of see why and it does get sorted. This makes the contemporary elements nice and grey and dark, especially with the theme of murder (and play-witches) in the background.
The mystery itself is pretty well laid out, I had a couple of suspicions, but it left it all a bit up in the air really well until the last moment, which made the suspense work. I did see a couple of the side plots coming but not the main one.
I liked that the book has a trigger warning for child abuse at the start too! Normalise this please publishers! I’d like to expand for gaslighting, mental manipulation, and terrible parenting. That last one isn’t a standard one, but all the parents here get that label!! We also get some lovely lgbt+ rep, with a lesbian relationship, a gay one just starting and a character coming out as trans. I largely thought it was good rep, but the book is sometimes a little confused by names and genders, so I didn’t know how good that was. Generally, it is done by what the characters as a whole know, but I would have perhaps liked to see the character in question use their correct gender throughout – especially as in the first section another character makes a point of noting gender! So the trans rep is nice for coming out but perhaps a little sensitivity reading is needed to tidy it up? I’d love to see a trans persons thoughts on how it was handled.
Overall I liked the contemporary elements more than the mystery, which is unusual for me, but that’s the way this is written. It’s certainly a nice quick read and something I think could work for a lot of readers! 3 stars.
Buy Lies Like Poison from Waterstones.
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