The Book:
The Five Year Lie by Sarina Bowen
Published May 7, 2024 by Harper Paperbacks
Date read: June 13, 2024
Find more May 2024 releases here.
The Five Year Lie spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
Ariel
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
She thought it was love. Then he vanished.
On an ordinary Monday morning, Ariel Cafferty’s phone buzzes with a disturbing text message. Something’s happened. I need to see you. Meet me under the candelabra tree ASAP. The words would be jarring from anyone, but the sender is the only man she ever loved. And it’s been several years since she learned he died.
Seeing Drew’s name pop up is heart-stopping. Ariel’s gut says it can’t be real. But she goes to the tree anyway. She has to.
Nobody shows. But the text upends everything she thought she knew about the day he left her. The more questions she asks, the more sinister the answers get. Only two things are clear: everything she was told five years ago is wrong, and someone is still lying to her.
The truth has to be out there somewhere. To safeguard herself—and her son—she’ll have to find it before it finds her. And with it, the answer to what became of Drew.
With a heart-stopping romance that only Sarina Bowen can execute, The Five Year Lie is a page-turning, spine-tingling thriller that will have you guessing until the very end.
The Five Year Lie Spoilers
The Reveal:
Shortly after Ariel receives the text from Drew, she learns that there was some kind of cell tower glitch and messages that were sent on the day her father died five years ago were only transmitting now. (Plot hole: everyone that mentioned getting a delayed text only got one single text. You’re telling me every single one of these people would only send/receive one text that day? Especially over something urgent? I send my fiance at least 12 stupid texts a day.) Ariel still has questions though, since Drew’s text was sent after he dumped her and told her something was wrong. She also had searched for Drew in the employee database to find him completely erased.
Ariel’s friend Zain began helping her look into Drew and his disappearance. He was in charge of the company’s cyber security, so he had a lot of access and know-how. There was a program Drew had been querying that Zain couldn’t find information on, which raised red flags. Zain hired a PI, who finds out that Drew was an alias.
The Ending:
Eventually they determine that Drew’s real name was Jay. The one thing he was honest about was his foster home, so Ariel went there for answers. A friend of Jay’s late foster father told her that a local cop had had it out for one of Jay’s foster siblings, and when the foster father tried to protect her, he mysteriously died. The foster sister killed herself over the cop’s blackmail.
The cop had illegally gained access to the family’s home security video through Chime. Jay was determined to figure out who was responsible.
Spoiler Thoughts:
The whole storyline with Adele’s husband felt very unfinished. In my opinion the resolution was very anticlimactic for how much time the author spent building it up. I think this storyline could have been skipped entirely – as well as the chapters from the POV of Adele’s children – in order to give more chapters to the extreme hide-and-seek game. I felt that the game was barely touched on, and that’s what I was the most interested in!
I hope these The Five Year Lie spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
Thank you to BiblioLifestyle and the publisher for this gifted copy.
I thought this book had such a fun premise. A five-year-old text sends a woman on an unsettling investigation about her dead boyfriend’s cryptic message. This is one of those books where it’s best to go in pretty blind and just see where the story takes you!
The middle is somewhat slow, but the ending is satisfying and the reader isn’t left with any frustrating loose ends, which I appreciate. While some suspension of belief is required, as usual, I enjoyed the reveals and how it all came together.
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