What is this about?
Spurred on by the results of a DANA test, Reed Markham begins to investigate his mother’s murder, and her life in Las Vegas. He takes Ellery along for help, for moral support and an objective point of view into a case that he is far too close to.
What else is this about?
While we get to see a huge part of Reed’s life in this, it marks the opening of a new chapter for Ellery, as her father finally tracks her down.
Blurb
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.
All The Best Lies is an indepth look at Reed’s life, his family and the his biological mother’s death.
Up until this point, the previous books in this series gave us hints at Reed’s life, but this brings all those hints together into an investigation into his biological mother’s death. Camilla was murdered 40 years ago, while Reed was in his crib, and probably watched the whole thing.
It also brings up an entirely unexpected question: as the man he considered his adoptive father, Angus Markham, is actually his father, did Angus kill his mother to protect the secret of their affair? What happened to all the money Angus promised to pay Camilla all those years ago?
Reed goes to Las Vegas, accompanied by Ellery who is there as an objective observer. However, at the same time they continue to dance around each other, and this attraction between them that is growing.
In Las Vegas, Reed begins to retrace the investigation, re-interviewing old witnesses, and gaining a fuller picture of what went on all those years ago.
The interplay between Reed and Ellery makes for an interest step forward for them — both are skittish, and it’s clear that both do want to take the next step in their relationship. So it makes for missed signals and mixed signals as they figure each other out.
And into this mix comes Reed’s father and mother, and Ellery’s own dad.
With Reed’s parents, it becomes clear that his father is one of those men who exists in his own little bubble of politics, and handshakes and making sure of his family looks good on camera, without ever realising just how much more his family, in particular his wife, actually is.
Ellery in the meantime is doing her best to avoid calls from her father, only to get waylaid by him in Las Vegas, where he reveals where his been for the past few decades, and opens a different door into Ellery’s past. It makes future instalments of this series incredibly promising.
The resolution to the case is one I did not see coming by any means, but again for Reed’s story it presents some intriguing new possibilities for future instalments of this series.
For all the messiness around them, by the end of the book, I felt like Ellery and Reed were more each other’s anchors than they had been in previous instalments of this series.
All in all, All the Best Lies was a book that kept me glued to its pages from beginning to end, and which takes Reed and Ellery into uncharted territories in so many ways.
