Dinuka McKenzie has moved on from her trilogy of Australian regional crime novels and featuring Detective Kate Miles (The Torrent, Taken and Tipping Point) to deliver a standalone thriller. She Lied First is a domestic thriller set in the Sydney suburbs and revolves around Devika (Devi), daughter of Sri Lankan parents, Rupa and Sonny, and her fraught relationship with flatmate Kalyani (Kal). As the title suggests, Devi and Kal’s relationship is one full of lies. But as to the one that Kal “told first”, readers will have to wait for that to be revealed.
It is hard to talk too much about this book without spoilers so perhaps just the initial setup. When She Lied First opens, Devi is seeing a psychologist for some undefined trauma and is obsessively following a man called Nate. She wants the police to investigate Nate for something and has been warned off by them from getting involved with him. At the same time, the police have also warned Nate to stay away from Devi. Devi lives in a flat in Sydney’s south, as far from her mother as she can get, with Kal. Except things with Kal seem to have been strained for a while. As it turns out, for good reason. And those reasons involve Nate.
There is much more going on in She Lied First, some of it tied up with why Kal came to Sydney from Queensland and how she ends up meeting and then sharing a flat with Devi. There are also tensions between Devi and her mother Rupa and Rupa’s own relationship with her husband who has taken himself off to Scotland ostensibly to care for his ageing mother.
She Lied First is an Australian domestic thriller with a Sri Lankan flavour. The plot twists revolve around the relationships between parents and children, between flatmates and around secret identities, illegitimate children, secrets and lies. McKenzie slowly doles out the information through flashbacks and time jumps, allowing readers to make assumptions about characters and their relationships and playing with readers’ sympathies before pulling the rug out from them multiple times, right up to the last page.
She Lied First by Dinuka McKenzie
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