{"id":7024,"date":"2018-01-22T06:31:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T11:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7024"},"modified":"2018-01-22T06:31:50","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T11:31:50","slug":"the-end-of-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7024","title":{"rendered":"***The End of Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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photo: pug50, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Andrew Barrett \u2013 \u201cHow can you tell if you\u2019re lying to yourself?\u201d this crime thriller begins, and it\u2019s a good question. Middle-aged protagonist Becky, a librarian and the first-person narrator of the story, and her husband Chris, a police investigator in the north of England, appear to have been lying to themselves for some time.<\/p>\n

In Andrew Barrett\u2019s telling, Becky and Chris have been planning a crime, if not a perfect crime, one they think they can pull off, that will allow them to escape to a well-heeled retirement somewhere warm. To accomplish this, Chris will sell a stolen list of police informants to a notorious crime boss, appropriately named Savage. The high likelihood such a scheme could go wrong in any number of ways hasn\u2019t prevented their planning from proceeding apace. That is, until Becky arrives home one day and finds Chris dead on the living room floor and a team of gangsters ransacking their house.<\/p>\n

The gangsters want the informants list, Becky\u2019s tears suggest she wants her husband back, and her best friend Sienna is there to help. Becky learns that Chris received half of his \u00a32 million payoff up-front, but where\u2019s the money now? And where\u2019s the list? If Becky doesn\u2019t find one or the other\u2014from her point of view, preferably both\u2014she is promised a gruesome death.<\/p>\n

This is one of those \u201cthings can\u2019t get any worse, can they?\u201d stories, in which they always do, and author Barrett provides it with a loudly ticking clock. Becky has one week to find the goods or be torn about by trucks, in a technologically advanced version of that classic British punishment for treason, drawing and quartering, though without the drawing part or, perhaps in a concession to modern sensibilities, the disembowelment.<\/p>\n

Becky is an unusual character. Though she understandably works hard to meet the criminal\u2019s demands, her behavior is erratic. She cries often, and she\u2019s foul-mouthed and profane in a way not generally associated with librarianhood. (Read more about convincing female investigators<\/a> here.)<\/p>\n

If you like crime novels of the fast-paced, page-turner variety, you may want to join Barrett\u2019s many fans. He\u2019s a Yorkshire Crime Scene Investigator, who\u2019s written almost a dozen previous novels in two series featuring CSIs. The End of Lies<\/em> is a standalone and his first psychological thriller.
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By Andrew Barrett \u2013 \u201cHow can you tell if you\u2019re lying to yourself?\u201d this crime thriller begins, and it\u2019s a good question. Middle-aged protagonist Becky, a librarian and the first-person narrator of the story, and her husband Chris, a police … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"***The End of Lies - not your average librarian narrates this crime thriller.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,40,126,32],"tags":[1220,30],"class_list":["post-7024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-north-england","tag-novel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Pi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7024"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7026,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7024\/revisions\/7026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}