Adam and Sophie Warner and their three-year-old daughter are vacationing in Washington State’s Hood Canal for Memorial Day weekend. It’s the perfect getaway to relax—and to calm an uneasy marriage. But on Adam’s first day out on the water, he sees Sophie abducted by a stranger. A hundred yards from shore, Adam can’t save her. And Sophie disappears.
In a nearby cabin is another couple, Kristen and Connor Moss. Unfortunately, beyond what they’ve heard in the news, they’re in the dark when it comes to Sophie’s disappearance. For Adam, at least there’s comfort in knowing that Mason County detective Lee Husemann is an old friend of his. She’ll do everything she can to help. She must.
But as Adam’s paranoia about his missing wife escalates, Lee puts together the pieces of a puzzle. The lives of the two couples are converging in unpredictable ways, and the picture is unsettling. Lee suspects that not everyone is telling the truth about what they know—or they have yet to reveal all the lies they’ve hidden from the strangers they married.
Lying Next to Me by Gregg Olsen was published in May 2019 by Pinnacle Books.
This was my pick for our our mystery book discussion at the library for March 2025.
The narration is in first-person present tense but bounces around chapter by chapter across all of the main characters (with each chapter marked with the name of the person whose viewpoint we are switching to). We also get flashback details from some of the characters when important to fill the reader on the back stories. This is often tricky to do, and it takes a skilled author to pull it off correctly. I was pleased that Olsen made each narrator's voice distintive which added variety and character. I never once found myself lost.
Knowing where you are is important given that this tale is a tangled web of lies and deceit. Even when one can make a reasonable guess about something, the characters (many of whom are not overly likeable) also take things down surprising and emotional tangents. Olsen spins a very engaging tale that dots all the i's and crosses all the t's.
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